Well, that is unclear. Writing from Europe 100-1500 years ago suggests that most people felt quite different about time and did not have the impression the GP espoused. The overwhelming impression seems to be that things had fallen since the end of the (western) Roman Empire; there was a contrast in millenarian movements in the 10th century as the turn of the millennium approached.

However people are not uniformly distributed and such belief does not seem to have been the case in, say, the contemporaneous Arab world.

All that being said: I agree with you that claims that our era is somehow amazingly unique are way overblown.