Yeah, every single time I see one of these articles, I'm just like, "Where have you been since 2008?" The "American Dream" has been dead a long time.
It's literally why "adult" became a thing you do instead of something you are in the 2010s. Because the traditional hallmarks of middle class suburban lifestyle (the house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids and a dog or cat) have increasingly become an impossible pipe dream for the Millennial and younger generations. When the traditional markers of the transition to adulthood become out of reach for the majority of people, what does adulthood even look like anymore.
There's a very well researched video that goes over it that I stumbled across one day called the perpetual infantilisation of millennial women. It focuses on Millennial women (obviously), but goes into detail about how "adulting" became a word in the popular lexicon and how increasingly untenable a life like previous generations is for Millennials and Gen Z despite being the most well educated generation in history.