Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well the Industrial Revolution was objectively a worse deal for the average worker. The average preindustrial peasant worked 8-12 hour days, but had Sundays off and at least 120 rest days and holidays. Depending on how good wages were at the time, they may have only had to work between 120 and 180 days per year. Compare that to the 70+ hour weeks workers were made to work all year in factories during the period immed…
No, it wasn't. And it wasn't because of government regulation. The land you require for preindustrial peasanting was, of course, tightly regulated and owned by ... well, not you. Read the whole "tragedy of the commons", especially the part about government deciding to just sell the whole thing to the highest bidder, which instead of fixing the problem, set off another wave of city migration. If you stayed on the land…
Most of the writing comparing factory work to agricultural work is from after the enclosure movement forced large portions of the agricultural working class to take the "wage work" arrangement with a similarly brutal schedule and work pace to factory work. You're right that the technological and agricultural advances that led to enclosure created a source of poor workers willing to accept factory work.
Obviously the peasants weren't spending the rest of the time sitting around, they had to work on their own land to keep themselves fed and clothed. It definitely wasn't some sort of lazy paradise, subsistence farming is a brutal and unstable way of life, I'm just arguing that the early Industrial period was even worse. If you want an "objective" measure of quality of life across vastly different time periods, the height of the average European went down a few inches during the Industrial Revolution due to malnutrition and overwork, and only recovered to its preindustrial average in the first half of the 20th century.