Yup that's the thing: it's not only people who lived that era who do wish they could live in it today.
I never wanted to live in the post-WW II late 40s/50s: maybe the sixties though. For honestly the late 40s and 50s looked incredibly dull. Just dull: movies were dull, acting was dumb, music was mostly pathetic save for a few exceptions.
The boomers really lived the absolute dullest, naive, era and nobody fantasizes on it.
There's never been a teenager from the 80s or 90s saying: "Oh wow, I so wish I lived in the 50s". That's not a thing.
And yet I see many young persons asking me, today, about the 80s and 90s. They like some of the music (sure, some were cheesy but it wasn't the uber dull pathetic stuff from the 50s: not to mention the incredible poor recordings unless you were as successful as Elvis Presley) and they definitely enjoy some of the epic movies. And the cars: many twenty-agers do love cars from the 80s and 90s.
They understand it was pretty much today's world, but less soul-sucking.
There was '50s nostalgia in the '80s, though: Happy Days and Back To The Future.
There was some interesting counterculture in the '40s and '50s, but how could there not be when the dominant culture was so conformist and bland. You have to dig at least a little for that stuff today, because those countercultures didn't really become legible until the '60s, when they were already changing into something less interesting.
I'm really fascinated by the 1890s, myself. Would have been horrible to live in for medical reasons, but there was an amazing counterculture and avant-garde that was just amazingly cool and weird.
Yeah I think part of the limitations of these conversations is the constraints on how we look at time. The arbitrary boomers/gen x/millennial categorisation. When what seems to make more sense is big cultural societal changes. Which would fit into thinking of the history arc as 1920s > mid-1960s/1970s > 2000s
