The long-run, inescapable equilibrium is one wherein truckers with ugly wives will not work as hard, and truckers with no wives may not work at all. Of course, all sociological systems are propped up by a mix of social conditioning and biological impulses, and re-equilibration is never instantaneous.
A man raised under the hot wife paradigm might internalize certain principles like “a husband should sacrifice for his wife,” and continue to abide by those principles blindly even when he ends up marrying a sort-of-ugly woman. In the near term, the feminism egregore is banking on this precarious inertia carrying civilization forward, at least until a more sustainable solution can be discovered.