1) Saying "well sure you have money but money won't buy meaning" is usually just a self-defense mechanism. "Well I don't have the money, but at least I have meaning [questionable] and he doesn't [also questionable]." Money and meaning are probably uncorrelated. If anything I'd expect an average(!) person with money to have more meaning than average person without, given that by this only point of evidence, they are better at goal-directed behavior of some sort.

2) The 2nd point is the meaning is unnecessary. I am not sure how elaborate the religious life of subsistence farmers was, but I don't think they were looking for anything like meaning in a modern sense... Ditto for getting high on plants. It strikes me more of a curiosity motive to explain the unknown, the kind the drives modern science. To the extent that it involved meaning, it was more of a meaning of the person as a cog in the now-explained world, not some transcendence. Even the nobles/etc. would see their meaning in advancing the agenda of their city-state or smth like that. Going by modern cosmology, there's no inherent meaning in the universe, so any one you choose is just the one you create (arbitrary), or more likely someone else creates for you with their own questionable motives.

When I started thinking more of the finite-ness of life given the above, I found that it's not the lack of meaning that's the problem, it's the search itself. In this paradigm, money isn't everything, but time and experience is; and you have far more time and better experience in modern society if you have some minimum cashflow. Ideally, you need e.g. $60-80k/year (iirc that was the happiness plateau in the studies for the USA), ideally without sacrificing ~50% of your waking hours for it.