Yes spending most of the day in a factory or a mine and rarely seeing sunlight is definitively like living as a blacksmith 300 years ago (I said blacksmith because it’s under upper class and I assume by middle class you mean office worker not middle income)

Being a farmer is much easier as well now because machines make the work 100x easier and you only have to do 1000x the amount.

Africa has certainly never had stability and the Inca/Mayans/Aztecs certainly had it worse than the rural folk of Central and South America

Remember all those old paintings of kids going through garbage to find things to sell? That’s certainly not a modern phenomenon

What about the people in winter climates that for a large portion couldn’t work in the winter? Yes they still did stuff but it wasn’t 40 hour weeks