He has a mind of metal and wheels; and he does not care for growing things, except as far as they serve him for the moment. And now it is clear that he is a black traitor. He has taken up with foul folk, with the Orcs.
J. R. R. Tolkien generally resisted efforts to "read in" to his various works more meaning than was on the page; he eschewed a lot of the efforts to shoehorn a particular symbolism or interpretation on his fantasy epic. If you look at the depictions of orcs and industry in his works, the only place where they actually come together is at Isengard, under the direction of the wizard Saruman; in The Hobbit and elsewhere they are not especially mechanically inclined or advanced. Tolkien's orcs (and goblins, as he usually called them in The Hobbit) derive in part from depictions like George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) (cf. The Selected Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien 177-178).
The "primitiveness" of Orcs in works since Tolkien has been directly related to their depiction as "savages" and as an enemy of "civilized" peoples - and in a way it reflects the degree to which the orcs have "stood in" for some earlier racialist stereotypes in adventure fiction.
There's an argument to be made that the "savage" orc was popularized by Dungeons & Dragons and the various Tolkien spin-offs in the 1970s, and the technological divide was fairly well in place by 1983 when Warhammer Fantasy Battle came to the tabletop, depicting orcs and goblins with bows and axes contrasted with humans and dwarfs with pistols and cannon (and bows and swords and axes, WFB was a bit of an anachronistic fantasy kitchen sink), which in turn inspired depictions of orcs and goblins in works like the Warcraft computer game series in the 1990s, although in the latter the idea of "savagery" has been largely divorced from "technology."
Tom Shippey in The Road To Middle-Earth argues that Tolkien's conception of the orcs is originally derived from his extrapolating from an Old English word meaning 'demon', which is mentioned in Beowulf's 'orcneas' ('demon-corpses'). Tolkien also admits the influence of the goblins in George MacDonald's The Princess And The Goblin in Letters, as /u/AncientHistory points out.
Shippey argues that the nature of the orcs in LOTR comes from a particular dilemma that Tolkien has to struggle with in terms of the orcs. Firstly, from a storytelling perspective, Tolkien "needs a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction".
Secondly, however, on a theological level, Tolkien was deeply Catholic and took care that Lord Of The Rings was not heretical. Tolkien's Catholic conception of evil was Boethian rather than Manichaean. The conception of evil in Boethius' De Consolatione Philosophiae is that evil cannot in itself create - evil is perverted good. In contrast, the Manichaean heresy, according to Catholicism, is that Good and Evil are equal and opposite and the universe is a battlefield (in this situation, obviously, Satan creates as well as God).
As a result of his beliefs, Tolkien could not simply portray orcs as created by evil. Tolkien therefore mentions in the Silmarrilion that orcs are elves that "by slow arts of cruelty ... corrupted and enslaved", though in the Unfinished Tales there is a rival theory that they were bred from men. Shippey also argues that Tolkien was an author traumatised by industrialised 20th century warfare, and there is definitely something of the industrialised military in his the portrayal of orcs - and especially of his portrayal of the orcs in Isengard.
These various intellectual currents, amongst others, came together into Tolkien portraying at least some orcs as industrious. However, the authors and tabletop gaming pioneers following in Tolkien's wake didn't have the same theological compunction about how evil cannot create, or Tolkien's views on modern industrialised society as Tolkien. Often, such writers fundamentally identify evil with stupidity and savagery, in a secular way that views evil in different ways to Tolkien's Catholic way. To the extent that writers identify orcs with evil, they often share these characteristics.
Of course, fantasy writers sometimes pointedly rebel against the orc=evil equation in order to make a point about prejudice. The orc Mr Nutt in Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett demonstrates Pratchett's position that the societal situation the orcs are placed in is what is stupid and savage rather than the orcs themselves. Similarly, The Last Ringbearer by Kirill Eskov retells Lord Of The Rings from the perspective of an 'orc', who explains that 'orc' is simply a xenophobic word for foreign men used by Westerners.