Comment by nipah

Your view is incomplete. It did lowered lifespans, but also increased them MUCH MORE than before. It was not "oh, it got worse, now it is recovering". It was "it got worse, now it is much better than before". The amount of infant deaths it lowered, for example, is massive.

And it is true, those people did not got an iPhone and died, but this is also you saying this for them. You don't know all the specifics of history or all their motivations, the industrial revolution had a bloody story, but it's origins were also organic, it also had aspects of improvement. The world population grew almost 10x.

I don't think we are in a position to judge those past events to the lens you are posing.