I've noticed an annoying trend in fantasy writing especially that for wide market appeal that I just realised is the opposite of speculative fiction or diverging cultures.
Remember how 50% of the jokes in the Flintstones were about cave people imitating modern life with non-technological gadgets?
How did they mow their lawns without engines and steel manufacturing? They used creatures that ate the grass as they pushed them forward.
How did they shower without plumbing? They used a mammoths trunk.
How did they shoot stuff without gunpowder? Mechanical slingshots.
It's all retroactive logic, which is played for laughs in the show or funny backdrop.
But modern fantasy writing does the same thing just retarded.
How do disabled people get around without modern manufacturing and healthcare providers? Magic glowing purple wheelchair and wheelchair accessible dungeons.
How did black people exist in European mediaeval society without mass migration? Enough travelling merchants to make up at least 10% of the population.
How did people enjoy modern comforts without modern technology? Magic just so happens to behave exactly like technology with research and colleges and inventors.
I call this "Flintstoned worldbuilding". It is working backwards from our modern expectation to a society and expecting it to always work like that in every society, time and technological level. It doesn't work off the assumption that a divergent path leads to different outcomes but that every path must lead to the same, ideal state which just so happened to be 2010s California. And every disruption of that conclusion must be the work of an evil influence which just so happens to also embody everything that people from 2010s California consider morally reprehensible.
It's basically the opposite of suspension of disbelief, like an upholding of expectation. That's because all current western art acts not as a commentary of human nature nor an exploration of alternatives but a declaration of ought-to-be. It is the demand that even in middle earth, there is an equivalent of a BMW cruising alongside the riders of rohan.
The result of " end of history" thinking. We have arrived at the conclusion of history and the only good change allowed from now on is convincing more people to our side.