Yes, but your Grandpa would have worked long hours and saved hard for those tools. They would have represented days or weeks of pay. They'd have been cherished because of this.
These days tools take minutes or hours of labour time to earn. Look at a Bahco FineCut saw as an example: less than a tenner, and yet a very good saw. At my workshop rate, that's not even fifteen minutes to buy. At little above the Living Wage, it's still barely an hour. Think how we'd treat that saw if it had cost us £100, or £200 (still a fraction of a week's wages).
You have to compare like with like, after all this conversation was based on pattern parts: well, straight away the fact you (I, we) use pattern parts already says 'I don't want to pay OE price'. The tool equivalent would be not buying a set of four Faithfull files for (I'm guessing) £20, but one Bahco or Nicholson for similar money. Even then, I bet the inflation adjusted price of that would be less than the 1970's price of an equally high quality product. Nevertheless, we don't 'have' to buy cheap things: there is always a premium version out there somewhere. What happens? We look at it, see the price is multiples that of a perfectly adequate cheap substitute and generally say 'I'm not paying that'.
Another one I like is mowers: look at ads from the 1950's: mowers would have represented a serious lump of investment. The sort of thing that would have been saved and saved for, or perhaps been a wedding gift. Now, the average week's wage would buy a pretty decent one, or several cheap ones. A couple of week's wages would get you something really good. Stuff is cheap: really cheap. We don't know how lucky we are.