another side to this is how it's encouraging people to believe that the only way to get ahead is by more or less scamming. you can easily look at the world as a youngish person and see that getting ahead means affiliate marketing, or NFT scams, or crypto nonsense, or being Andrew Tate, or an "influencer" hawking crap on social media etc.
it's not just a lack of role models, it's also the way current governments in the west are setting policies - extreme care for older more established people or the already rich, while the young being thrown to the wolves with idiotic LLM/AI policies sabotaging their lives and careers, future pension likely clearly going down, the ultrawealthy having increasingly literal impunity, policies designed to keep housing unaffordable, etc
The way I think about this is if you split the money-making opportunities into two pools; one is rent-seeking/grifting/outright-scamming/beating greater-fool fallacy, the other is learning some sort of skill/trade and developing a career on that. At some point the perceived opportunity cost for the first eclipsed the latter, and now that's sort of where we're at.
Certain characters love to say things like "no one wants to work anymore." I think the rise of certain scamminess in our culture actually flies in the face of that; people will work insanely hard at whatever their thing is, be it an MLM or a crypto-grift. But they work hard because _they think that's where they can get the most value._ What's the value in going to school for 4, 6, 8, 10 years when you can make it big in the next big thing?