A lot of the early smearing and negative connotations of the middle ages actually came from some Italian renaissance writers who viewed classical antiquity as superior and saw themselves living in a new era, therefore coming up with this term "middle ages" (medium aevum).
https://twitter.com/DetroitWineGuy/status/1473105609092481027
Petrarch viewed the middle ages as a dark age. A lot of this was also related to linguistic obsessions as he wanted to resurrect the classical pure Latin as opposed to medieval Latin. This anti-medieval sentiment then carried on in some segments of renaissance.
This was then indeed picked up by Protestants who added the anti-Catholic interpretation, but it was started with Catholic Italian renaissance artists who for some reason always get a pass from everyone for their weird views.
The anti-medieval renaissance classical Latin purists were not just harmful because they were attacking medieval historic memory, but also because they essentially killed off Latin as a living language with their hatred of medieval Latin, and tried to revive a dead language.
So just pushing the guilt on Protestants and later on to enlightenment secularists doesn't tell the whole picture. There was also this other strain of antiquity-worship "ad fontes" neoclassicist anti-medieval thought which often existed totally separately of these two.
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