Traverse Fantasy

I watched a video that YouTube recommended like a cat dragging a dead mouse onto my front porch. I don't usually watch videos like these, and I knew that I would especially dislike this one, but I watched it out of a morbid curiosity about what Reddit-core world-builders have in their brains lately. Today was a rough day at work. You know it. The basic thrust of the video was that medieval stasis is the necessary result of a magical society, one which pursues arcane rather than technological development, and is aided by the extensive lifespans of fantasy races like elves who can dedicate even more continuous time to their pursuits of progress ("What if da Vinci survived another 100 years and invented flight before the Wright Brothers?")—although they might be limited by individual shortsightedness and a lack of willingness to adapt to changing times, compared to younger contemporaries. The narrator describes a potential social conflict between an arcane establishment and