I'm some flavor of utilitarian, but I don't think that makes the argument trivial. I also believe that most people's experience of disutility in response to inequality isn't an unconditional facet of their personality, but is heavily mediated by their environment, including factors like "how salient do we make existing levels of inequality in day-to-day life" and "how much do we tell people that they should expect to experience disutility from their own positional inequality".
Also, people's experienced utility is not solely a function of positional concerns, so the claim that things increasing in absolute terms isn't an improvement (in terms of experienced utility) seems trivially wrong. To the extent that it's a useful claim you could say the same thing about reducing inequality; there's nothing inherently good about that, except to the extent that it improves experienced utility. So that circles back to the questions of "which factor(s) have a stronger effect on people's experienced utility on the margin", "what 2nd order effects (including feedback loops) might occur due to our proposed mitigation", etc, which ultimately boils down to an empirical question about whether people will gain more (long-term) from absolute improvements on the margin or from positional improvements on the margin. Economic growth compounds, so sacrificing it as a temporary band-aid (that might make the underlying issue worse!) before we've even reached "fully automated luxury space communism" levels of wealth seems like a sucker's bet.
Also, people's experienced utility is not solely a function of positional concerns, so the claim that things increasing in absolute terms isn't an improvement (in terms of experienced utility) seems trivially wrong. To the extent that it's a useful claim you could say the same thing about reducing inequality; there's nothing inherently good about that, except to the extent that it improves experienced utility. So that circles back to the questions of "which factor(s) have a stronger effect on people's experienced utility on the margin", "what 2nd order effects (including feedback loops) might occur due to our proposed mitigation", etc, which ultimately boils down to an empirical question about whether people will gain more (long-term) from absolute improvements on the margin or from positional improvements on the margin. Economic growth compounds, so sacrificing it as a temporary band-aid (that might make the underlying issue worse!) before we've even reached "fully automated luxury space communism" levels of wealth seems like a sucker's bet.