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That's approximately my take on age-gap relationships. But the question of better off can be 'squishy' because its hard to really imagine the counterfactual scenario where they didn't have the relationship.
But it seems that ethically the older person should be actively trying to leave them in a better position, financially, career-wise, or at least creating a more stable life-path for them so that when the older guy exits, the woman's life isn't immediately thrown into chaos.
For heterosexual women, there's the issue of their eventually waning fertility, where a dalliance with an older man that lasts a year or more is inherently decreasing their chances of having kids. Or if they do have kids and the guy leaves, now they're really up a creek, and the kid is probably worse off too in ways that giving them financial support probably won't make up for.
So I think there is an inherent cost to a powerful man using his status to string along young, possibly naive women and making it much harder for said woman to end up in a stable, happy life situation, and those costs often are NOT internalized by that man.
The objection here is that its often hard to know when a guy is a 'known' womanizer and exactly how bad his proclivities are. Sure there's an obvious baseline for most guys, but unless other women are taking down detailed notes of their experience and sharing it with other females (sometimes happens!) there's a clear information asymmetry there, and one that a woman may not even knows exist.
Unless he marries her, that is. One would imagine, all else being equal, older guys to be more marriage minded- and eligible- as a rule.
A good question to examine. The more marriage-minded ones would
I can say there's an unfortunately high number I've noticed who are just horndog lotharios who know how to appeal to young women (of a certain type), and are unrepentant about that. And some who are just get divorced or otherwise find themselves single in middle or late life and decide to go for it.
It is more than fair to say that there's increased competition for the young, marriageable women due to older guys also jumping in the pool.
As to how they treat the women, well, there's nobody actively policing these guys so we can be pretty sure there's some significant amount of destructive behavior occurring.
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