The per individual thing is weird. A family of 4 spending 40k/yr goes in the lowest (first) category?
If i were to tell myself that I needed to be worth 5 million, I would need to adjust my expectations for ER. At our current rate, I could probably hit 5 million at 62 years old, but that's not ER anymore (and doesn't include having children and my wife quitting her job). For 1.625 million, I can hit that by my mid-early forties.
It seems you are missing my point. My point is not that you work longer to get more money, my point is to raise your goals so you can hit lesser goals faster. At the point of reaching lesser goals you can always re-evaluate your high target goal. As in your example, you assume you need to work till 62 to hit 5 million and this will become true because you believe it to be true and you have let it take over every fiber of your being. If you picture yourself dragging your feet all the way to 62 that is what will happen. If you target 5 million in your mid-forties you may find you can retire at 1.625 million in your 30s, should you decide to at that point. People here are creating lower ceiling limitations and that will always delay your FIRE. Refer back to my original point that "People making $100,000+ per person in passive income are in a different league. I could only get to that point if I didn't retire early. " This is limiting to believe because it tells yourself that you are incapable of generating great wealth in a shorter timeframe, I chose not to self limit in such ways, and this helps greatly in getting to FIRE at any level and any dollar amount. Life imposes enough constraints, no need to self impose limits on personal output.
But if you can hit lesser goals faster, then you can FIRE faster.
No one here is saying "I'm not gonna bother with 100k passive income because I don't think I can" but we're saying "I won't bother cause I'll ER way before I get there."
Even if you could save up 2.5MM in only 5 years and ER w/ 100k+, that just means you could ER well before that with 1MM.
For many of us, we chart an optimal path to FIRE. It's quite quick for many of us.
Your idea of setting a higher goal, then quitting when you get partway there is semantics. It'd be silly to say "My goal is 50MM by 50...and I'll quit when I hit 1MM at 30." Why not just set your goal to be 1MM at 30?