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...because it paints a deceptive portrait of the past.I assume this is at least partly deliberate, because it's a major part of what has been termed the "Religion of Progress," in which the history of humanity, when you squint hard enough and ignore most of the actual history, is a "rising line from the caves to the stars." Life in the past must be worse than life today in every reasonable way you can describe it, and life in the future must be better than today, because this is what's demanded by the current myths.
The problem, of course, is that any moderately in depth study of the history of humanity demonstrates that this absolutely hasn't been the case, outside the effects of the industrial revolution from the past 250 years or so - which, as is now becoming rather obvious, has some serious downsides as well as the assorted miracles it's produced. And the focus of some of the (if not brightest, at least best paid) members of society on tricking other people into staring at a bunch of tiny flickering dots for as long as they possibly (while the world is literally burning around them) can doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's going to be considered particularly well in the future. Not that we should be praising it right now.
JM Greer has done some solid writing on the "Religion of Progress" concept, and it's just depressing how often you see life and history crammed into that mold, because it's the way we've been trained to think of the world. It's also going to be responsible (or is being responsible) for a lot of mental anguish when reality refuses to deliver what we think the future ought to be. Humans won't go to the stars. We probably won't ever have flying cars, Jetsons-style. Etc.