> would still put me most of a decade ahead, financially
I think that might be the kind of the crux of it. Saving this money to get a decade "ahead" might help your retirement life (assuming things don't collapse before then), but not your current life. Whether that's considered "life-changing" might be in the eye of the beholder.
> No one can not consider that life changing in that context?
Money only changes your life when you do something with it. If you just just let it sit (for retirement or whatever) and continue living as before, then your life hasn't changed (yet).
If you dispute this, then consider the most extreme case: what happens if you (say) die before you have a chance to use that money during retirement? Did that money change your life then? In that case your entire life was (by definition!) the same as before; only your retirement account ended with a higher balance than it would've otherwise. The only thing that changed was your expectation for the future, not your reality.
And you can imagine other situations where the money ends up not changing your life in any significant way... like the money getting stolen before you use it, creditors taking it during bankruptcy, hyperinflation rendering it effectively worthless, etc.
Point being, as long as the money hasn't actually changed anything in your life, it... hasn't been life-changing. (I guess in some sense this is a tautology.)
The point here isn't "it can't change someone's life", of course it can. The point is there are lots of people for whom it wouldn't do so, and for those people it legitimately isn't life-changing. e.g., a lot of people would lock that money away for retirement and avoid factoring it into major life decisions at the present. Of course, there are also people who would spend a billion dollars immediately (and even those who would then go broke again). YMMV.
I think that might be the kind of the crux of it. Saving this money to get a decade "ahead" might help your retirement life (assuming things don't collapse before then), but not your current life. Whether that's considered "life-changing" might be in the eye of the beholder.