What you're asking about is about the idea of scientific and technological progress, and how that "meme" became something that was widespread and taken for granted. I can't answer for all times and places, but a general trend in Western Europe is that in the late medieval and early modern period, the meme was more about "restoring lost progress" than "making new progress." The entire idea of a Renaissance ("rebirth" or "revival") was that in the past (re: Classical Greece and Rome) they had achieved huge heights of art, politics, philosophy, and what we would call science and technology (two terms they wouldn't have used then — think more in terms of "natural philosophy" and "craft"). Then that knowledge had become "lost" during the fall of the Western Roman Empire (the reality is a lot more complicated than this, but this is a meme we are talking about, not a literal historical read). So through the recovering and reading of Greek and Latin texts, Humanists and the like could recover this knowledge and get their world more on an even footing with the achievements of the past.

As I noted parenthetically, whether this was what people were actually doing is a separate question. Bertrand Russell has an amusing quote about philosophy and philosophy in this time period that I really enjoy: "One of the curious things about the Middle Ages is that they were original and creative without knowing it." The medieval period actually saw the development of many interesting philosophical (natural and otherwise) ideas that were quite different (and in some cases, more accurate) than those created in antiquity, and certainly saw the development of technological items that were far superior, in their context, to what would have been around in the longer past. But the "meme" of them being "behind" the Greeks and Romans was a real one, even if you could make a strong argument that they were not.

So when did it change from a narrative of "rediscovery" to a narrative of "progress"? This happens in the early modern period, around what we sometimes call the "Scientific Revolution" (historians of science generally don't like the term and don't think it existed in the sense that most people imagine). It varies who and where you look, but around the 17th century you start to see people explicitly positing that their knowledge is not just resurrected old knowledge, but genuinely new and better. There is an interesting contrast, for example, between Copernicus and Galileo. Copernicus' text, for reasons that are probably both about making it palatable to his context and audience, but also probably are what he believed, repeatedly emphasizes that the idea of heliocentrism was known to the Ancients and can be seen as an extension of their ideas. It's a "lost knowledge, recovered" kind of argument. Whereas Galileo a generation later explicitly made clear that his work was a "new knowledge" situation: he was seeing new things that was showing him that, in fact, the "old knowledge" of the Greeks and Romans (and, as well, the Jesuits) was wrong. Jupiter had moons, the Moon has craters, the Milky Way is made up of tiny stars, the Sun has spots, Venus has phases, etc. — all things no Ancient had ever observed, or could observe, because they lacked a crucial technological tool, the telescope. It is not a coincidence that many of the most bold calls to saying there have been new observations were tied to new ways of "seeing": instruments that extended human senses into new realms, like the telescope and microscope, and instruments that allowed people to create artificial and bizarre conditions (like the vacuum pump), were often at the center of complex claims about entirely novel ways of understanding the natural world. And so were questions about whether such new technical gadgets actually could get you new knowledge that was on par of the deductive approaches of Plato and Aristotle; not everybody took this for granted, at all, and it is quite a different kind of claim to knowledge than had been made before.

One shouldn't see it as an overnight change (e.g., a "Revolution" model), but gradually over this period you go from the "I am still rediscovering ancient knowledge even though my ideas look different than some of the ancients" (Copernicus) to the "I am using new technology to discover truly new facts" (Galileo) to something like the 18th-century "Enlightenment," in which educated people are sort of defining their status on the basis of rejecting the past and using science and technology as a way of proclaiming their progress, and then extrapolating (with limited evidence at the time) that this would continue onward and upward forward.

The Enlightenment, even by its very name, is as noted as a sort of rejection of the whole previous "revival" meme. It is people saying, we are actually smarter and more knowledgable than those in the past, even if acknowledge (as many did) that there were still large areas of ignorance. But it was in acknowledging that this ignorance was not just a product of the fall of the Western Roman Empire, but a more fundamental and profound one, that was a real difference. (That said, one shouldn't confuse these people for being intellectually humble; their ideas of progress generally did fill them with more self-confidence and hubris than they really should have had, in retrospect.) The Enlightenment philosophers and scientists and craftsmen are the ones who basically pushed the "progress" meme you are asking about, in other words. It is always interesting to point out, I think, that we sometimes imagine that the Enlightenment was the start of the process of "progress," but historically it is sort of the end of the so-called "Scientific Revolution" period, and many of the historical figures they counted as responsible for this work (Copernicus, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, etc.) were actually in a somewhat different headspace (Newton, for example, did a lot of "rediscover lost knowledge" work in his actual practice, notably in his chemistry/alchemy).

Even in the Enlightenment one sees far less attention to craft/technology as a form of "progress" than one might expect in retrospect; they were still very focused on the "science" end of it, separate from the other. The joining of the two was more an idea than a reality for most of this time period. The shift towards seeing technology as a prime mover of history, and an exponentially progressive area, came with the Industrial Revolution, which radically transformed the Western world over the course of a generation or two, and sometimes over the course of a number of decades. The result of this is the "progress" narrative we are very familiar with today, that science an technology grew exponentially, and will continue to grow exponentially into the future, and that they are indeed linked to one another. And a corollary to this is your specific issue, of seeing the past as being (exponentially) worse at these things than the present.

As with the other memes, you can interrogate every aspect of the "progress" meme as well (e.g., does progress in science/technology really exist, or is this a teleological notion or illusion?), and historians of science and technology, as well as philosophers, spend quite a lot of time actually doing that. But that is another essay one could write altogether!