Depends. How do you measure it and how much further back? Because, in the short term and in some ways, yeah, it was, insofar as small agriculture was kinda collapsing and large agriculture was starting to consolidate. A big driver of the move to cities in the Industrial Revolution was both climate and political/economic forces making even subsistence farming much harder to do than before, which incentivized urban migration. (The political/economic drivers of urbanization are as old as civilization; Roman indigents flocked to Rome because farming was hard and getting harder, when their lands weren't being seized and they weren't being outright turfed out. Egyptian grain becoming the dole of Rome attracted people without any other options. Again--cities as population sinks.)

So in some ways, and in the short term, the Industrial Revolution was better than just-plain-starving, sure. But most of the benefits of the Industrial Revolution accrued to everyone else and the mangled limbs accrued to the poor. It wasn't without significant worker action (and the requisite workers-getting-beat-to-shit-and-killed) that their lot improved materially.

Is subsistence or subsistence+ farming hard? Absolutely. Mind-bogglingly so. But the Industrial Revolution was fucking bad for the people caught at the bottom. Like--read Dickens.

I tend to think we have such global largesse that we could do better. But we won't, and a lot of the commentariat here cheers for never doing better.