I don't think this is new at all, it is just manifesting itself in modern ways.
If you check leaders from the past, they always had fancy clothes and ordered statues to be built according to their own looks. Today's celebrities are doing exactly the same (except the statues)
When people have reach a proper level of comfortable wealth they start behaving like this. In the past, as I am sure you know, only leaders were able to have considerable wealth, today that's not the case, and as general wealth is increasing, this behavior will also increase, especially because technology also makes it so much easier to share content with a lot of people. The only way I can think for this tendency to be stopped, is a huge change in human behavior, so that people will organically stop adopting this attitude, although this change will have to wait for a few decades in my opinion.
That's true