Inspiration is one thing, but counterbalance is another. The whole point is that the research indicates your experience is decidedly an outlier: it doesn't counterbalance anything.
For every one of you (or me, for that matter: I was born into a family in which few had graduated high school and grew up frequently going hungry in a single parent home and am now a well paid physics PhD holding data scientist and engineer) there are dozens (or more) of people who grew up in similar conditions and never made more of it.
Is it fatalism, or a call to change the system that exists? People are not saying "no one other than the rich should try". People are saying "our system should be restructured such that the avenues to success are more evenly distributed".
Indeed. I came from a neighborhood of dirt and chicken coops. Now I am a post-doc conducting state of the art research in cognitive neuroscience. While the money hasn't come, I suppose I have my own sort of story of upward mobility.
You are, of course, right. My story is meant to inspire and serve as counterbalance to the fatalist viewpoint in the original post.