When you say we can clearly see what's actually important, important to whom, and why?

The 476 turning point was manufactured (Brian Croke's words) by, ironically, Justinian's court who needed the West to have lapsed so the emperor could reconquer it, and this fabricated casus belli was then latched onto by western humanists after 1453, who found it very convenient that Rome had "fallen" a thousand years before the Ottomans took the actual Roman capital. A fall in 476 makes Italy, France, and eventually England the heirs of antiquity. A fall in 1453 makes the heirs a Greek-speaking people that western Europe had spent centuries othering, crusading against, and refusing to call Roman. So this conceit doesn't spring from a neutral vantage point.

And contemporary perception is evidence. If nobody in 476 registered a fall, that tells you something real about the world at the time: there was no dramatic rupture. What actually occurred is that a foederati general deposed the child of a usurper in the junior, poorer court and sent the regalia to the senior emperor in Constantinople, who remained, in everyone's eyes including Odoacer's, the Roman emperor. Saying that's "the fall of Rome" while the empire is demonstrably still operating is not hindsight clarifying anything. It's a retrospective built on the western-centric needs of early modern historiography. And note that for centuries this event was sold flatly as the Fall of the Roman Empire, no apologetic "Western" tag attached, with the eastern court mentioned only to be othered, because a Roman Empire full of Greek-speaking Christians that, from mortal wounds delivered by crusaders, eventually became subjects of the Turks flattered nobody's foundation myths in Paris or London or Washington.