Jonathan Blow makes a bunch of great points about our simplified view of ancient people, versus the reality of their complex achievements which could only be brought about by lots of ingenuity and iterations.
All I have to say is that on Windows the Blue Screen of Death was a prominent problem for many years. On the original MacOS that was non-preemptive multitasking and no memory hardware protection, any program could cause a denial of service or take down the whole computer. These are 30 year old technologies that were clearly worse in many ways than modern equivalents.
Has software improved recently? No, I would say it has gotten somewhat worse recently but if you look at where we are today versus say 1998, things are clearly better. It isn't really possible to know if we are in a major decline or a minor local minimum.
It reminds me of Shepard Tones which sound like they are infinitely increasing in pitch which is impossible because the human ear can only hear certain frequencies. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzNzgsAE4F0)
Their business model was (and to a degree still is) predicated on getting people used to everything having bugs, and not complaining or, more importantly, returning it for a refund, angrily. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams, and now everything else works almost as badly.
In comparison, iron could be made basically anywhere.
Plinys “Natural History” contained detailed geographic information, but was considered a work of history (surprise, surprise).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_architectura
Ptolemy (100-170AD) wrote treatises on many subjects, and his works on astronomy and geography "never ceased to be copied or commented upon, both in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy
Vegetius wrote a military manual On military matters, extremely influential until about 1500.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetius
Apicius wrote On the Subject of Cooking, a cook book.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apicius
(So much ancient writing hasn't survived, e.g. none of Aristotle's many writings survived - what we know as his writings are just his students' lecture notes.)
So many being lost is an inevitable consequence of very very few copies ever existing.