This worldwide push for online ID verification is absolutely not in good faith, and I'm shocked at how few people on "Hacker" News are seeing it for what it is. Imagine going on 1990's or 2000's Usenet and telling those folks they'd have to upload government ID to prove they weren't children and keep using the system. Virtually everyone would have shouted this Big Brother shit down until it was their dying breath.
Parts of Usenet actually mandated real names. The idea was to make discussions more civilised. It didn't. And on top of that people were now subject to stalking and doxxing. I remember a poster who had a link to a defamation site in his signature. The site was targeted at another frequent poster in that newsgroup, detailing his address and his alleged intellectual failings.
That's assuming all sectors have become more efficient. Some, like construction, have become less efficient. And that's a big problem when it's relevant to necessities like housing.
Suppose people used to spend 20% of their income on housing and healthcare and 20% on apparel and electronics. Then housing and healthcare triple in price, apparel drops by two thirds, electronics drops by 98%, and everything else stays the same. Are they better off? No, because the most you can improve the cost efficiency of something is 100% (it becomes free), but the things that that cost more can increase in cost by more than 100% of the original cost, and some of them have.
Housing prices aren't going up because of construction costs alone. The biggest increase is from the cost of land. For that the cost of a house on top has become less and less relevant. If construction became really cheap, prices would still trend upwards since there's always some billionaire's money to be parked somewhere.