Do you know whether Sam buys or makes his own espresso?

Do you know that any given barista makes minimum wage?

Do you know that any given barista has no other options than being a barista?

In two sentences, you made more unsupported assumptions than either the original article or the comment you're replying to, yet you seem to find them tone-deaf and insulting. How do you think a student working a morning barista shift for decent extra money because they enjoy coffee culture and talking to people would find your post, if not tone-deaf and insulting?

I don't accept that people have no other options. This is life, it's unscripted. There's always more options than we have imagination. Working as a barista is not slavery, the person choose to do it because it seems to them to be their best available option. I find their judgement questionable, but if it works for them, who am I to say otherwise.

A quantity of options does not mean every option. The barista in question is not likely someone who can just choose to switch to a much more lucrative job. They could pursue that direction, there's always room for improvement, but as Sam mentions, there's a compounding-interest here. So, someone starting at a lower point has to start with very small productivity decisions and persist as they slowly compound to become something more substantial.

Also, while the economy isn't zero-sum, there are zero-sum aspects to it. We can't have every garbage collector suddenly become a high-end programmer or something or our system will fall apart due to piling-up of garbage. Any one garbage collector could better their lot, but until we have dramatically automated everything (and that's still a long ways off), we need people to collect the garbage.

In short: we don't have a caste system, so any arbitrary working class person can rise to higher classes. But that doesn't change the system, it just shuffles where people are. We don't have an economic system that can function without a working class.

If/when the working class gets paid better, then they can afford to invest in improving themselves more because they won't be desperate for every day's income just to survive. Some people will make poor judgments with such freedom, but others will thrive. So be it. I agree with your "who am I to say otherwise" quip as long as you aren't appealing to total-relativism.

I read things in his post that indicated he's aware of his luck and privileges and neither takes them for granted nor credits himself for having them.

I know lots of jerks out there parrot the victim-blaming nonsense that everyone could just be rich and successful if only they did the right things (while our whole economic system is based so much in exploitation that it's actually impossible for everyone to be middle or upper class, our system wouldn't run that way)…

So I understand taking Sam's comments in that light, but from my reading, I think it's a fair assumption he's not one of those jerks, even if he's also not one of the people focusing primarily on the injustices etc.