Like holy crap I can hardly imagine seeing 4 dollar-digits of liquidity in my account. In my lifetime, and I think I work hard in a role in society like anybody else.

What do you mean by 4 dollar-digits of liquidity? Like $1000? That feels a bit low unless you’re in a country where the yearly income is 1-2K.

…and then they reap returns, and go on and start businesses with “risk” (but not much, proportionally) and then publish books about “quitting the rat race and following your dreams.”

It’s even lower than you’d think. The cutoff for basically never needing to work again in your life is around $1M so top 18% of the US. At that point as long as you’re willing to live off 30-40K and invest in index funds statistically you’ll only ever get wealthier. (at least historically for the last several decades)

~600k per year

Why are you using income? It’s wealth that matters and that’s a ~$16M cutoff.

To reach that you’d need to be earning ~600k per year for 2-3 decades, to invest the majority of it, and to get absurd stock returns on top of that.