The "money vs things" framing gets sharper if you split "things" into two buckets: consumption goods (the luxury t-shirt) and productive assets (land, tools, an income stream, a paid-off house).
What you are defending isn't money as an end, it is the optionality a functioning financial system gives you: time, mobility, ability to redirect capital quickly. That dominates a closet full of brand-name clothing for almost everyone.
But it collapses in two scenarios most readers haven't lived through:
1. Currency stress, where the optionality is denominated in a unit losing real value faster than wages adjust. Hyperinflations (Weimar, Zimbabwe, more recently Venezuela and Argentina) compressed the trade to weeks; people who held land, working businesses, hard commodities, foreign currency kept their wealth.
2. Counterparty failure, where deposits, money-market shares, and bond claims turn out to be promises from someone who defaults. 2008 was a near miss; the bank failures of the 1930s were the actual outcome.
Steady state: you are right. Tail state: the opposite. Most US household-finance advice assumes the steady state holds forever, which is a strong assumption.