A good way to reality check this is to think about how frequently we saw loading splash screens then vs now. Back then it was common. Office suites, IDEs, browsers, pretty much any non-trivial app would show you a splash screen whilst it loaded. Some even had progress bars in the splash screens. Nowadays even web apps don't have splashes (though you could argue that grey loading flashers are the modern equivalent).
Many web pages have loading progress bars. They're usually only 1-2 pixels thick and take up the entire top 1-2 rows of pixels on the page. Some stuff loads asynchronously, so it can be easy to miss them, but I see them all the time. Just today, I was using Jenkins and it does that!
It made me wish for a different way of presenting history. The best alternative I could come up with was something like a map of various rivers that intersect and cross each other at certain events. Each river being a particular trend or pattern, like "military buildup, conflict, then decommissioning," "personal incomes rose," or "belief in X rose/fell." Smaller tributaries could be included to cover smaller trends that sometimes grow larger.
This would avoid the annoying habit where things are explained chronologically but then have to jump back in time later in the narrative, when the subject changes. And it would also illustrate better the idea that history isn't so much "one damn thing after another" but more like an ongoing interaction of different trends.
Side note: writing this comment made me think of the Buddhist concept of dependent origination, which I don't know much about but seems like a good metaphor for this topic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratītyasamutpāda
The other thing that makes this tricky is that any given event or phenomenon may not happen everywhere all at once. Just think of the popularity of a pop song, for example. It might have started in New York, and spread westward as more radio stations started playing it. Then it kind of died out in New York just around the time it was picking up steam in LA, or whatever. When you read about these things they often make it sound like one day someone played the song on the radio and then it was on every radio in the country simultaneously for the next 10 weeks before falling off the charts. But of course, that’s not how it actually happens. So it can definitely be hard to contextualize some of this stuff. And getting an accurate picture can be hard because we may not have all the details.