The narrative and word choices are deliberate. Republicans want to get rid of Social Security. So the narrative is Social Security is fundamentally broken, and it can be silently ended through passive negligence without having to take responsibility for ending a popular entitlement. No matter that it was created with the expectation that Congress would periodically adjust the retirement age to keep it solvent, and that it was always intended to provide only a bare minimum benefit, just enough to keep you out of the poor house. Poor houses were real, common things back then, and what the "free market" will result in.
Social Security revenue and expenditures can easily be balanced in theory. But neither party wants to do the right thing--Democrats want to expand entitlements, and increasing the retirement age as originally designed is the opposite of their goal.
I don't quite understand what you mean the narrative here -- cash flow going negative is a fact. Attempts to discuss the COLA issues in 1970s-1980s [1] have failed. Attempts in the early aughts to divert funds by Bush Jr. [2] (long before I could even vote) were rejected in part because of skepticism stock returns would not perform well. And even today where we have additional tax breaks for seniors under the OBBA.
This has been a long running "heads we win tails you lose" with the older generations toying with the future dating back ~50+ years. Statements about "poor houses" don't mean very much when even uncapping the tax on wages for social security would only close ~61% of the gap [3]. Cuts are coming.
[1] See for example this hill (https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/4258578-the-day-the-soci...) article discussing he issue [2] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/bushs-shaky-retirement-pl... [3] https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/