A thought I had was, that this might be a paid online poll. The answers might reflect the true feelings of the demographic that makes it a hustle to respond to those.

Its probably something like this, but theres a lot of more significant potential pitfalls with an online poll. For example, at least in my circles, is basically common knowledge that its a good idea to take these polls whenever you get the chance, but answer what they want to hear so you don't get screened out. Similarly, theres lying about age. Even just how the question was asked could have a huge impact; "How much will you have to earn to be financially successful?" is a different question to "how much do you have to earn to be financially successful?" given that one implies future or continued wealth while the other implies current costs. But again, none of this was specified, so we're making assumptions - instead we should take only the information that was provided. So little is given, it could have been run by, for example, emailing their mailing list subscriber with the poll and offering a raffle entry for each submission, or hell, even something like a Twitter poll. That would still match their given methodology.

Anyway, from my personal experience, the results are not obviously wrong. I matured before influencer culture became big. To me, it was always people playing pretend; a form of online role-playing; another thing I never got into. I feel that those a bit younger, who grew up with influencer culture, simply did not develop a world model where that distinction exists. Of course, these topics don't come up in casual conversation, and on the internet you never really know someone's age.

For claification, I'm Canadian, not American, so my experiences will be a bit different. That said, I've experienced this some with Gen Alpha, but not really GenZ. Keep in mind, GenZ is at least age 15, and averaging around 23: still young, but already starting to come to terms with income and costs of living. Most people this age are from before the current influencer economy, and even then, they are going out into the world now and usually learning the value of money quickly. If anything, I think the ridiculously high number given in the poll (if taken seriously) is just as much or more an indication of the expectations for rising costs of living, instability, and inflation. GenZ is old enough to understand these concepts and have seen how they affected the world, likely in 2008, and definately during covid. Its not like this sort of toxic worship of money is anything new or unique either - think of the reality shows that were popular before they moved to the internet, for example, and all the tabloids and drama that teens and young adults followed even before that.