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I don't think noblesse oblige comes from hard times, I think it comes from a combination of culture, tradition, education, and honesty about privilege. The nobles of yore were rich and wealthy because
Their parents were rich and wealthy. Therefore their parents could educate them and teach them about how to properly handle being rich and wealthy with the proper composure and respect for each person in their position.
They happened to be lucky enough to be born into said family. This makes it clear that their position is one inherited, not earned by their own efforts.
The peasants underneath them work hard and pay taxes to them. This makes it clear where the wealth is coming from: the efforts of the peasants under them. Of course the nobles did their own estate management and politics and whatnot, but the core production and farming is done by the peasants and with no underling peasants the noble has no income.
Further, the peasant noble relationship is less distributed. You don't have millions of peasants paying taxes which are combined and then divied up among a bunch of nobles, each noble family is in charge of specific peasants. If those peasants thrive, the noble thrives. If the peasants suffer, (at least economically) the noble suffers. You can't tax what isn't there. These together create an environment in which noblesse oblige can thrive. A Lord which makes good decisions will simultaneously benefit their peasants and themself. A Lord which makes bad decisions will have poor peasants and thus make themselves poor. A Lord which makes very bad decisions will have suffering peasants who have a very specific target for their anger and can rebel against the Lord specifically, rather than trying to overthrow the entire kingdom which consists of a mixture of good and bad elites.
Modern elites rise and fall in power and influence in a massively distributed system in which increasing your ability to capture larger slices of the existing pie dominates over trying to tend your own garden and increase the size of the pie. The ability to charisma and politick your way up the ranks causes new elites to rise higher than they deserve, while the competent value creators end up in middle management. And the high mobility across space means that terrible mistakes are met not with rebellion and death, but with an escape to a new job with a blank slate reputation, or a cushy golden parachute retirement.
I don't see how hard times would change this, there were both good times and hard times in the past, and noblesse oblige was present through both, though was universal in neither. It's the skin in the game by which peasants and elites shared good times and bad times that enabled and incentivized noblesse oblige at all.
Yeah, I get the impression that @functor’s understanding fits a later development. As militaries modernized, warrior aristocrats started to have a much harder time standing out, so justifying their social role got more important. By the end of WWI, their reputation for martial dominance was bleeding out in the mud. The hard times of modern warfare were not good fuel for noblesse oblige.
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The origin of the concept of noblesse oblige can easily be found in the phrase itself i.e. nobility, hereditary privilege that you are born into i.e. something that you didn't earn through your own efforts and were never expected to, and which thus obliges you to follow certain norms.
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