An optometrist cannot see through your eyes, so they use that lens comparing machine and ask you "which is better", and that leaves plenty of room for the patient to bias the results towards "different from normal is 'Better'", such that they vastly bias their new prescription upwards. Even if every optometrist is thinking about that and purposely downgrading the results of that flow, that could still provide room for the ratchet effect of eye prescriptions that many people with glasses have experienced.
Wearing glasses for 40 years and talking to ophthalmologists and optometrists.
Also I don't know where you are getting your glasses from, but where I am it's been decades now that the measuring of eyesight (with a machine) is done before the lens fitting, which mainly focuses on astigmatism.