It is true that long before the Industrial Revolution, which began in Britain in the mid 1700s, there was slavery and feudalism and other forms of imperialism in most of the world. This coerced labor existed for thousands of years.
But that's different from the largely free association environment of the Industrial Revolution, where people hired out their labor to capitalist employers (admittedly, exploitive).
Answer to Q: Before the Industrial Revolution, for most people in the world, economics revolved subsistence farming, animal husbandry, e.g. sheep raising, fishing, hunting, and the like. All of this involves hard work. Often out in the rain and mud and hot sun. No free food as there is today. (Don't want to work? Then you don't friggin eat.) No free handouts from the government agencies.
Probably 20 to 30% of the population had specialized skills like blacksmithing and carpentry that paid better, but even for them hard work was still the norm.
And a whole bunch of negative shit to deal with: recurring bad weather and poor crop yields; substandard housing; criminals and bandits roaming around, stealing anything that's not secured or murdering people; wars and other conflicts, government agents coming by and demanding tax payment–or worse, involuntarily dragging you away for military service–roads to neighboring communities were a morass of mud half the year……the list of onerous conditions was long.
So when anti-work people today go on and on about the oppression of the modern world of work — the evils of the capitalist exploiters, the corporate overlords, the injustice of the working conditions, it's good to take a perspective of history. Reading a few hundred history books helps.