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Not to get deeply entangled in this discussion, but I suppose the steelman to IGI is that the material improvements that we live under are far from permanent, and could well disappear before we realize it, and suddenly we find ourselves back to the brutal state of affairs known to the past.
Consider Mad Max, a media franchise that remains fairly popular today despite the original film being more obviously inspired by the Oil Crisis (a temporary shock that helped spur us into changing our ways), and the sequel defining the post-apocalypse tropes that made it so influential, despite it coming out at a time when the Oil Crisis was likely abating, if not already ended.
The Curse of Plenty, the thing that gives rise to the narrative of "good times create weak men," is a trope we see in fiction and in real life. We go from rags to riches and back again, just as ancient religions had ways of saying that we come from nothing and eventually return to nothing.
I do personally feel that we had a peak of "goodness" in recent decades that may well have been an anomaly, and that the "dreamtime"/whalefall (to borrow from Scott) is well coming to an end. We can only hope that things don't snap and break apart once all the slack is gone.
Well I don't disagree with that proposition. Does anybody? What is supposed to be drawn from that? Yes if we were reduced to the material level of the 15th century we would probably live similarily to 15th century people. But so what? What is the use of pointing out such a banal fact?
Perhaps to point out that we don't actually have that much logistical distance from the 15th Century? Our technology and our logistics support each other in an interlocking balance, and certain things cannot be sustained without other things.
ETA: That being said, if you put a gun to my head and asked me to answer where I think we'd end up in the event of a global collapse, I think our tech level might be dropped down to possibly 18th-century levels, assuming that electricity somehow becomes unreliable or scarce alongside fossil fuel.
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And there are places where they mostly disappeared, for one reason or another.
And actually we are not so far away from crucial infrastructure being disrupted (one way or another - regulations, armed sabotage, outright war) and ending with no cheap electronics, power shortage, major famine.
To take extreme but possible example - nuclear war will not kill everyone (far from it) but would wreak things for survivors. Full scale exchange would have death toll in billions and would decisively disrupt pretty much anything.
Serious pandemics are possible and after COVID it seems clear that more lethal pathogen would be a massive problem.
And so on.
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