It's important to remember that this same problem haunted historiography for at least 2 centuries, if not much more. At least from the 1700s, and lasting well into the 1900s, historians considered themselves the historians of events, rather than non-events. As such, they automatically gave too much weight to change. That a different approach was possible was not even considered until modern anthropology got going in the late 1800s. But credit for the big change in historiography is typically assigned to the Annales school and to Fernand Braudel in particular, and his concept of the "Longue durée":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longue_durée

"The longue durée is the French Annales School approach to the study of history. It gives priority to long-term historical structures over what François Simiand called histoire événementielle ("evental history", the short-term time-scale that is the domain of the chronicler and the journalist), concentrating instead on all-but-permanent or slowly evolving structures, and substitutes for elite biographies the broader syntheses of prosopography. The crux of the idea is to examine extended periods of time and draw conclusions from historical trends and patterns."

We should not expect ordinary layman to get things right when professional historians, until recently, had a strong bias toward events (and even now, many still demonstrate this bias).