The point is how to best use cash, you can't determine how rich a person is by just looking at his/her spending habits.
Lets go back to my example, what if a person has 11 million in cash and he spend it all on the 11 million dollar house. According to you, he is a rich person because he use cash.
And if another one who has 30 million, but he only put 1 million down and borrowed the rest, because he rather spend his cash investing, is he a poorer person than the first one?
Unless you are able to see all of a person's financial assets, otherwise you don't know if that person is really wealthy, or pretending to be wealthy.
It's not fair to say all people who lease cars or mortgage houses don't have money.