You're not going to get any argument from me that shit is fucked. Everyone should have guaranteed access to housing, food, and healthcare, and we don't. A lot of kids were set up for failure by their parents insisting they take out college loans. But your standard for a minimum cost of living is basically the minimum to live like a boomer in the 70s.
The average white male boomer in the US lived like a king compared to everyone else around them, even at the time. The descendants of those people tend to think that the fact that their parents or grandparents had this means they should too. In reality, those boomers were incredibly lucky to be born into a privileged class during an economic golden age.
We don't get that, we get the world they fucked up. Rich dickheads hogging all the wealth and stealing wages is nothing new, it's been the standard for all of human history. What is new is that you can see clearly how well the privileged live compared to you. Maybe that will cause things to change, idk.
In the meantime, we need to make do. An emergency fund is intended to be used for emergencies, which are things that threaten your ability to acquire basic needs (food, housing, health). You keep it funded at 6 months of expenses (e.g., the minimum you need to meet your financial obligations plus food+rent). When it's full, you don't keep adding to it. When you use money from the fund, you replenish it as quickly as you can. Everyone should have one.
You shouldn't be having an emergency every single year though. If you are, it's not an emergency, it's an extra expense you need to plan for. If you are spending double-digit percentages of your income on debt (car loans, credit cards, etc), you need to stop spending money on anything else but basic needs until you pay it off. Or start a revolution, but we're arguing on the Internet so I don't think the odds of that happening are high.
The world sucks. It's not fair. You can still live a good life in it though, even if it's not as good as it used to be.
I'll stop here because your position is incredibly privileged and you refuse to see that. The minimum wage is too low, that's not the point though. 70k a year is absolutely a comfortable wage for a single person to live on in almost every place in the US, except the biggest of the major cities.
You may not get everything you want but you should be able to cover everything you need, including an emergency fund, and still have enough to put aside a 5-10% for savings most years on 70k. If you really don't believe that, you live in a bubble.