Completely agree, I’m personally sick of the Medieval times being viewed as “the Dark Ages” where everything was objectively worse. Not only is it from a modern, first-world perspective as you’ve pointed out, but it’s also extremely Euro- and Christian-centric and ignores that most of the rest of the world experienced at least a couple ‘Golden Ages’ during the same time. Hell, even IN Europe, the Islamic states were often (though not always) better off than a lot of their Catholic counterparts. I think a large part of the modern view of the Medieval times being ‘backward’ come from two main sources: 1-propoganda that came during/immediately after the various Crusades/Iberian Reconquista (not to mention the subsequent discovery of the Americas); 2-the Bubonic Plague which, without a doubt, WAS awful for everyone involved, but for whatever reason we tend to forget that it was only a relatively short amount of time (roughly one decade towards the start of the time period during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Justinian, and another decade roughly 800 years later) within the much larger time frame of a whole millennium