Are you seeking to read specifically because you want to understand *history* or do you want nuance of *historiography*? As an example, as part of my degree I had to read a variety of older histories on slavery, starting with U.B. Phillips. This was important, because U.B. Phillips was the first person to really talk historically about slavery within the United States, however his conclusions were utterly wrong, and all has been disproven by later historians. My advisor had me read it so that I had an understanding of change over time, how historians think about history, and how they use sources and evidence to create their arguments. However, if that was the *only* history book I had ever read on slavery, then I would have little understanding of the actual history of slavery.

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Which is to say, if you're not putting newer histories in conversation with older histories (which is what historiography is - the history of history) then I'm not sure that reading older histories is a useful thing to do with your time. This, of course, is my opinion. However, the top historians in their field are well versed in both the older course of writings, as well as new works created by their colleagues. If a specific topic is interesting to you, by all means start at the beginning, but my advice would be to make sure that you also read newer works. History is nuanced, and historians work hard to correct inaccuracies in older works. If all you read are older works with the thought that you "know" the correct history, you may miss key elements and sources that aid in the current understanding of historical themes and movements.

Reading older works of history can be very valuable - as long as you pair it with reading more recent histories. Older works typically have different standards of evidence and different methodologies which, broadly speaking, lead them to be less rigorous or relevant than more recent scholarship. However, they've often still been influential to the field as a whole. This isn't to say that older histories are worthless on their own - but you will get the most out of them if you read the field as a whole. In general, the best way to learn about a field is to just read everything you can - old books, new books, journal articles, academic book reviews - the whole thing.

dislike the whole "EVERYTHING IS SUPER EXCITING!!!" or the modern morality brigade on everything before 1980 (like, "then [tribe A] enslaved [tribe b] (which was terribly wrong and they're terrible people)" (way to make a stand...)

Contemporary historiography is not twitter. In particular, if you're interested in Bronze Age Europe (as the OP indicates) you're unlikely to be encountering polemic in an academic context. Contemporary historians aren't a cabal of 'post-modern neo-marxists'. It's an academic discipline and most research produced is just that, research about the past - based in large bodies of evidence. Archaeological reports or large tomes on precise cultural and political changes don't usually attract politicians.

There are some sub-fields where 'morality' does comes into play, but I'd argue that some of these fields - like genocide studies - do need to address moral and political issues that are pertinent to those fields. I don't think it is facetious 'morality brigading' for someone like Deborah Lipstadt to criticise Holocaust denial, for instance.