Even aside from the big advances, look at things like clothing in the past few decades. Outdoor clothing has changed enormously but so have so many other day-to-day things--a lot of which are about electronics but that's materials-related as well.

It's an interesting question. Why couldn't the Romans have invented $X? And the answer is mostly the tech tree. There are probably exceptions around things like germ theory of disease and so forth but it's mostly true.

Any post about tech trees sooner or later mentions 'I, pencil', so let's get it over with:

https://fee.org/ebooks/i-pencil/