I know this board has dealt with presentism and other problems. There have been historical figures like Galileo or Giordano who were turned into representatives of current ideas. Narratives have been shoved into the past. Like there being "a war between science and religion" even if one or both of them were absent in say, Europe for a large chunk of history.
History has also been treated like a work of entertainment with labeled "bad" or "foolish" people with the "wrong ideas" fighting the "good" people who might have "had the right ideas". I've seen examples in both the entertainment industry (see Cosmos' version of Giordano and various films like Braveheart) and out of it.
And there's how past cultures are still being treated with contempt, as if they were lower beings paving way for later eras. For example, the Medieval Era is treated like a time where after the Roman Empire fell, Europeans forgot how to bathe, paint, use tactics in warfare, etc. Until the Renaissance fixed everything. Such as bringing back perspective, etc.
I understand what you're saying, but it seems to me that what you're describing is a characteristic of history as it plays out in everyday life much more than it is of academic history. History has a great deal of power, and the arguments you list above probably offer more information about the present-day people who make them than the past people whom those arguments are ostensibly describing. History is useful, in other words, and it's awfully tempting to instrumentalize it to make a political argument, a claim on culture, a moral judgement, and so on.
That's not to say that academic historians don't have their prejudices -- far from it. But I think it's fair to say this: the people of a particular time and place aren't necessarily the most reliable authors of their own history. That may seem absurd -- and especially so considering how much historians rely on primary texts and oral histories -- but new evidence is always coming to light, and historians are always testing new methodologies and interpretive frames that help us to better understand the past. If that wasn't the case, and we could simply accept the narratives produced by whichever past actor was powerful or canny enough to record it, we wouldn't need historians at all.
Professional historians aren't in the business of dismissing historical actors for being unenlightened, but we are invested in untangling the forces that produce historical change. If one of those forces is the power of the sort of narrative you describe -- one of ever growing progress that puts to shame the achievements of past actors -- that's the sort of thing a historian would study. But not, hopefully, reproduce in her own work.
I think there's a bit of a misconception in the question. Pop culture may frequently treat history as some sort of progressive movement to the glorious time that is our own, but professional historians do their damnedest to stay away from that folly. We try hard to make sure that we consider our historical actors in their own time frame, rather than judging them by our own standards.
Now, of course, part of building a narrative is deciding what kind of story you're telling. Is it a positive story or a negative one? Do the people you're writing about progress or regress? These are choices that are up to the author, of course, but any academic historians is going to be careful not to suggest that their subjects were some kind of barbarians who didn't know anything. Still, it can be a problem in the broader culture, and has frequently been so for a while now.