It is important to note that life satisfaction and happiness are weakly correlated metrics, quite famously so. One is not substitutable for the other. In particular, life satisfaction is correlated with income at all scales whereas happiness is not.

You optimize for one to the detriment of the other. American culture is atypically biased toward the "life satisfaction" side of that tradeoff.

I would expect that data to be mostly noise though, after all, there is pretty strong evidence towards some soft form of "set point" level of happiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedonic_treadmill

What does that tell us? One person could be unhappy because their boss verbally abuses them every day in team meetings. Another person could be unhappy because their decent and fairly paid job prevents them from playing video games. Finland is once again ranked #1 on the World Happiness Index as the happiest country in the world, yet has a suicide rate much higher than the global rate.

I think the bottom line is that there is no one figure that informs us about all questions. But certain figures have strong correlations. People rag here almost daily about how GDP/Capita is a poor measure of x, y, or z, yet cannot name a low gdp/capita country they'd prefer to have been born in. Because GDP/Capita correlates very precisely with higher standards of living.