>We did it in a pristine world the first time. The next time we do it in a world stripped of natural resources and easy energy with a collapsing biosphere soaked in poison and radioactive waste.

Well, we did it in an ice age the first time.

I mean, there's still quite a number of resources on the surface, plenty just sit there because the ratio of setup cost / profit isn't there

The demand a smaller civilization would have should be quite less significant than what we currently have, so it stands to reason it would make sense for them to use those

Even knowing the broad concepts of Crop Rotation, Germ theory, or Computation, means that you shouldn't take that long to get back to an advanced stage, you probably won't actually get to whatever SOTA you had on those fields for a long time, but knowing where to look is quite significant in cutting wasted time

Not necessarily, basically the majority of our technology is the result of a very, very brief period of innovation.

So long as we don't forget that it's important to wash our hands and clean out wounds with soap, we're already centuries out of the middle ages.