I think it's easy to lose sight of the fact that on the whole what we did is exactly what our children do, which is what others of our age were doing at the time.
For my generation, and I know people who were young in a different time and place will have been different, that meant getting married young, buying a house first after saving for a couple of years, establishing a career, and having children - in that order. Most people married in church, even as non-believers, and most spent very little on exotic honeymoons, or on travel, as cheap flights didn't exist, and nor did the expectation of regular and long-haul travel. They made do with what we could get by way of furniture until they could buy their own, and saved for what they wanted.
Fast-forward 30 years, and my children's generation also do what their friends do, on the whole and yes, still a generalisation - not all of this applies to either or both of mine, never mind a whole generation, but a lot of it does. They are well-travelled, they live together before they marry, and consequently have more long-term partners. Many have children before marriage, and are unfazed by this (and are not gossiped about for doing so). More have gone to university, and most have large amounts of debt to repay, so their attitude to debt and saving is very different from ours. They had to learn at a young age to sleep at night knowing they owe tens of thousands, so whereas I hate the thought of having money on a credit card, they just accept it as normal. A house costs more than 10 times an average salary, so saving by not doing small things (like buying coffee on the train ) makes no real dent in the shortfall in their deposit fund, and they prefer to live more in the moment than we did. They spend on holidays and prefer experiences to possessions (and really don't want the things that many of our generation hold dear - walls of books, 'best' china, dad's prized 'music system' are all seen as tat that will go in a skip when we die). They still read and listen to music but do it digitally, so spend on phones, iPads and other gadgets instead of on books and records as we did.
And so on.
I repeat that these are generalisations rather than anecdotes, so I know that some posters have diligent children who have saved £10 a week since birth, gone nowhere, done nothing and cut back on everything in order to buy a house, and that others lived bohemian lives in their own youth, travelled without a care in the world and saw saving for a house as bourgeois, but there are always outliers, and anyway I suggest that in the majority of cases that would be what their friends were doing too .