Am I missing something? Early retirement questions

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Hi everyone,

I very recently started educating myself about real estate investing, so bear with me because aside from the Beginner's Guide and the Millionaire Real Estate Investor, I'm still very green.

My question is, how does one go about in conservative real estate investing, such as buy and hold, and accumulate enough properties to realistically live off of the passive (debatable) income?

If one were to purchase one property a year for twenty years, end up with $20,000 a year in cashflow (which is very successful real estate investing IMO), you STILL are only making $20,000/year and still have many properties with large mortgages to pay off for many years, since much the the properties were likely leveraged highly. How is it possible to truly live off passive income, which for most people is higher than 20k?

Wouldn't saving like crazy (>%50) from your career and investing in index funds be more simple, risk averse, and even more lucrative way to early retirement?

Again, feel free to tear into this because I'm simply posing a hypothetical. I truly understand that real estate is not a get rich scheme, but I'm having a hard time understanding the lucrativeness of real estate over anything under 20 years.