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maybe they did? glass working is pretty ancient.

“a normal eye with regular vision and unaided by any other tools can see objects as small as about 0.1 millimeters.”

>i guess the artisan had excellent vision.

Not being in front of a computer or mobile screen all day helped!

Back in the mid-20th-century, they used to blame nearsightedness on reading in bed.

Nearsightedness would actually help quite a bit with fine work like this. Before presbyopia took hold with me, I could easily focus on my own nose, while things started getting pretty blurry about three feet/one metre out. (These days, I have about a 10cm clear vision range uncorrected at an utterly useless distance, just at the limits of an arm's reach.)