My father bought the family’s first house thanks to a Veterans Administration loan, thanks to his having been in World War II. My wife bought her first house - a tiny little crackerbox in a less than desirable neighborhood - because her parents essentially gave her the down payment. By the time we were married and ready to start a family in the 1980s it took both our incomes and the equity she got from her old house to qualify for a mortgage.
It was never “fairly easy” to buy a house in your 20s or 30s. The big difference is that it used to be the federal government’s mission to come up with enough FHA and VA loans to get a lot of people into homes. That’s not true now.