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I have visited a pre-industrial villages in Eastern Europe and not once did I feel the urge to trade places.Well, this is beside the point, this was about whether "household chores took the best part of the day". Not whether you would trade to rural living or not.
>The hosts spent two hours preparing a hearth to cook bread for us
So? I've roasted, cooked, etc. for decades, and it was never a big deal, nor you have to be over the wood-stove or grill for the whole time (when you do, the cooking is very fast, like with some meats). And if there are 3-4 persons in the household (as there always were, families lived with several children and grandparents where never far away), it's dead easy to have rounds keeping an eye on it and still be free to do whatever else.
>And you are vastly underestimating the child death rates where small children roam freely. Children in factories might have arguably been safer than on a farm.
You're vastly overestimating.
Kids restrained is modern helicopter parent hysteria. Kids generally roamed free up until the 70s in most places in Europe, and well into the 60s in most neighborhoods, even in cities like New York. It's not some medieval phenomenon, or something associated with "high child death rates". The ocassional kid could stil e.g. drown in a lake, like the ocassional kid today can be hit by a car. But that was not where "high child death rates" came from. Increased child death rates were indeed a thing, but were in birth or small age due to the lack of modern medicine (and most of it basic stuff, like cleaning hands, penicilin, etc, not high test medicine). In any case, not something particular to "kids roaming free".