Yes of course, money is a beautiful abstraction, a way of keeping score in the game of life. Before you quibble about the "beautiful" descriptor, consider that in the absence of money, one would be hoarding food or petroleum or clean water or anything of value. We don't do that, we freely distribute those necessities of life, while hoarding abstract money instead. The primitive form of money when invented was a circle of metal stamped with the image of a king. Then it evolved through printed banknotes to it's ultimate form and ultimate abstraction, digital bits in the memory banks of computers. I have thought a lot about the abstraction of money, having spent a career designing and manufacturing computers for the sole purpose of counting money and making myriad forms of financial tranactions.
The fact that we hoard money - a completely abstract concept - instead of any physical thing of absolute value, is what enables all financial and economic systems of all forms, including Capitalism and Marxism and everthing else. The obsessingly tracked "Dow Jones Industrial Average" is an abstract construct of other abstractions, all of which are measured in dollars, a completely abstract measure.
Yes we owe our success as a species more to money than to medicine or agriculture or digital electronics or fossil fuels. The fact that most people unthinkingly accept and use money in spite of it's abstract nature is actually astonishing. You were of course introduced to this very early in life by the gifts of coins when you noticed that coins could be exchanged for candy, ice cream, and other delights.
For the love of money is the root of all evil. - 1 Timothy 6:10 KJV
....is assuredly true. Also and equally true, is that money is the root of all that is good within life. To truly understand and appreciate the beauty of life, one has to appreciate the score keeping system we use, which is money, a thing of great beauty and perhaps the greatest of man's ideas.
Edit: The terminology and judgements that you are making are worth some analysis. For one thing, the terms "poor" and "proper" are relative metrics. A person on welfare only in the USA is among the lower 10% income bracket here, but the top 1% in the World. YOU are a part of the USA's Middle Class unless I miss my guess, as are most PO.com members including me. All of us number among the most fortunate people on Earth, and in the context of the World, the top 1%. Each of us is wealthier, healthier, happier, has more freedom, and is in every way that matters, better off than royalty a century ago.
.....billions who lack proper healthcare, proper diet, proper education, proper sanitation, proper housing etc.
I would simply point out that the World's poor are also better off today, in spite of the fact that there are so very many of them. Yet you in your priviledged position of the 1% think that they don't have enough. What purpose would be served by giving them "proper healthcare, proper diet, proper education, proper sanitation, proper housing etc."? If we did so, there would be more of them, right up until the point where the planet's ecology breaks from profound sickness and other symptoms of human overpopulation. This concept of the sanctity of human life is an artifact of Western philosophy dating back to the Ancient Greeks, and is present in all Western religions, including the modern popular ones Scientific Atheism, Agnosticism, and Humanism - which ARE religions in the basic sense.
If you had also simply studied Anthropology, during your formal education or afterwards, we would not be having this conversation. Consider for one moment that most modern academics exist in profound ignorance of the true nature of primate humans.