If you only look at the past it's nearly impossible to tell a sigmoid curve from an exponential.
And, at the species level I'd argue boom-bust is a fine survival pattern, witness plagues of mice and locusts.
Sigmoid or exponent to bust, doesn't have to mean life ends.
Rome as a state existed for multiple tens of generations across plague and famine. 4 per century is normal, a thousand years is 40. Would anyone alive today be able to cast back 40 generations and say "life is hard" at scale?
A thousand years ago we barely had discrete components let alone VLSI. Those monks were bespoke all day long. Machines had few moving parts. Radios weren't invented until the reformation, Linux came along in the age of enlightenment, and nuclear was invented by Victorian times? Wait.. wrong timeline.