Hot take but the concepts of marriage and nuclear families have some inherent flaws. People change over time and may become incompatible, and emotions change and die down as well. Evo psych warning I guess, but I think people are built to form exclusive relationships for like, 5 years, and then their kids can go wander around a close-knit tribal community where everyone knows each other and is happy to teach them stuff. Marriage was an unfortunately necessary response to the breakdown of those communities with the advent of civilization, but the idea of the nuclear family is much more recent and didn't come around until the Industrial Revolution. Before that it was more common to live together with your extended family, which would typically have established roots in a community. But with the Industrial Revolution, people moved around a lot more, which meant more atomization, more separation from the support network of the extended family, and of course a less friendly and less safe environment for children to run around in than like a family farm. Even as things improved materially, the atomization remained.

That's the background going on when Hippies entered the scene and saw that shit was fucked and responded with the idea of "free love," as a rejection of the whole thing. But it was a pretty idealistic approach, that neglected the material conditions that drove the development of relationship norms to the point that they were at. The norms were very bad and they recognized that they were bad, but I don't think there was much analysis beyond that. This is kinda captured in the ending to The Graduate, where, after a big dramatic scene with a bride running away from her wedding with the main character, they hop on a bus, and the camera just stays on them as their expressions change as practical realities start to sink in, like that they don't actually want to be together and that she'd already exchanged vows before running off, but hey, they totally owned their parents.

So my guess is that you have this generation that is aware of the flaws of traditional relationships and vocal about them, but then ends up coming back to them because the same material conditions that created them still exist. And that's how you get "wife bad." FWIW previous generations had shitty marriages too, it's just that the problems were more buried and it's hard to make jokes about a problem when you're trying really hard to pretend it doesn't exist.