I’m sick at the thought of me slaving my ass off at a job that pays okay, and yet I will most likely never be able to own a home.
I can empathise. For some people, life is just hard and it sounds like you made the right move by taking on debt to gtfo of your shitty town, but you have more work ahead of you.
Capitalism is just a way of managing resources and value. Right now, probably the only value you have is the labor you can provide, and right now you are selling your labor to a single buyer. Of course you'll get paid OK, they'll pay you the minimum they have to.
You might not be able to do this now, but you need to take your skillset and sell it to many people, as an independent contractor (a tradesman), or as a small business owner. If you don't have a skillset that can be sold in this way, you have to gain it first. The next stage is to employ other people who can work for you. This is how I achieved/am achieving financial independence.
You can hate the game, but it's pointless, as you have to play it in one way or another. You can take the easy strategy of what you are currently doing (believe it or not, you are still playing the game on easy difficulty), or switch the difficulty to hard, where you forge your own path. The great news is, you don't have time for consumerism when you're calculating how to pay vendors and pay your staff in your early days when cashflow is low.
It is true that it was easier at one point but whinging about this is also pointless, as that's what you've got to work with. There is still an enormous amount of wealth in this world, and some of this can be yours if you try, but you will have to work a lot longer to get it for as long as you trade your time for money from a single buyer.