Why do people say that hunter gatherers don't work very much?

It's a commonplace these days for people to insist that hunter gatherer societies don't do all that much work.

Questioning the notion that the hunter-gatherer way of life is a “precarious and arduous struggle for existence,” Lee instead described a society of relative comfort and abundance. Lee studied the !Kung of the Dobe area in the Kalahari Desert (also known variously as Bushmen, the San people, or the Ju/’hoansi) and noted that they required only 12 to 19 hours a week to collect all the food they needed.

A couple of reasons why this isn't really very interesting as an observation:

Let us first revisit the !Kung themselves. As Lee himself would later mention in his 1984 book on the Dobe !Kung, his original estimate of 12-19 hours worked per week did not include food processing, tool making, or general housework, and when such activities were included he estimated that the !Kung worked about 40-44 hours per week.

The second being that it's near impossible to have any population density among hunter gatherers. 7 billion people trying to live like that would rapidly be dead as they stripped every living thing, including each other, from the environment.

But another observation.

The average British food budget for a family is some £60 a week. The median full time hourly wage is some £13 or so an hour. Our calculator tells us that this is 5 hours of work a week for the food required. Note well that that is 5 hours work to feed a family, something we can define as the (still, just about) modal four people of two adults and two children, or if preferred, two adults only. Using that latter we work somewhere between one fifth and one tenth of the amount of time hunter gatherers do to fill our bellies.

How the hell does anyone still say that we work more than our ancestors?