It's not true that everything is more expensive. Nominal prices are higher, but incomes have risen faster than inflation. Purchasing power of the average person in 2026 is higher than it was in 2016.

As for things getting worse, I guess it depends on the domain. In hardware, things have gotten a lot better; my desktop computer is orders of magnitude more powerful than I would have expected 10 or 20 years ago. In software, I do see a lot of bloated software being written, but I don't feel that the software that I personally use has gotten worse.