Sorry people said those things to you. Not helpful. Not kind.
We have some suuuuper spendy friends who are lovely, awesome, fun people, but who clearly have different ideas about money than we do. Which is fine! I try not to judge, and for the most part, they do the same. They've known us for years, they know we have some habits they think of as weird, and they don't care.
I will say, though, that I ran into one of my very spendiest friends in early January, and she was totally burned out by the excess of the holidays. And she told me she'd learned this new word -- "frugal". I about fell out of my chair, but after I recovered, we talked about it a little, in a light-hearted way. Like, "Instead of buy the shit, don't buy the shit." And we invited them over to our house for pancakes.
We'll see if it sticks. But my hope is that just maybe I've planted a tiny seed.