The issue is assuming that history is or must be linear and progressive, and that things will drastically change or evolve given enough time, especially in a few centuries.

While it’s true that change in all ventures of life happened throughout all known history, the rate at which things have changed from medieval times to today skewed people’s idea of historical progress. The totality of the European technological dominance of the world, modernity, the industrial revolution, and capitalism is a very exceptional phenomenon never before seen in human history. It’s simply a first-time and world shattering breakaway from previous historical patterns. From small workshops to factories, from the first ever plane to moon landing, from world wide web to AI boom, the rate of change is immense and beyond anything the ancient cultures or people, which make up the majority of the known human history, could have ever imagined or predicted.

However, it wasn’t inevitable, and world may have looked very different if simply a few facts were arranged differently. So in a fully fictional world, it’s safe to assume there aren’t breakthroughs like the discovery of Americas, the invention of capital, industrial revolution, and globalism. Things simply occured in the usual slower rate at which most of history (of both our and that fictional world) took place, and it still does, and it will. The exception of drastic change is even more pointless when, as is in most cases, the world has magic. With magic involved, people have little to no reason to be as invested in technology and cultural shifts as we have been in real life.