Yes, most modern secular historians assume that the ancients’ depiction of the sky as a hard dome must itself have developed by the supposed fact that, without modern technology and ‘science’, the human being can perceive the sky only to be a solid-surface dome that resides far above the clouds.
But the fact is that humans had been seeing the sky for an effectively very long time before they ever began making beaten metal bowls (Hebrew ‘raqia’).
If Adam and Eve were made readily capable of deducing from the empirical information constituting the sky that the sensible air may well not extend to the luminaries, then such metal bowls originally were likened to the atmosphere, not the other way.
If God so made the readily visible information of the sky so that it matches humans’ natural abilities to observe that information on its own terms, then the origin of the solid-dome model of the sky is that in how humans originally understood the likeness of these shiny metal bowls to the atmosphere: these bowls depicted certain characteristics of the atmosphere, such as shiny in the light, thin relative to its contents, and firmly holding its contents.
The atmosphere literally shines semi-opaque blue in the Sunlight; is thin relative to Earth; and holds firmly round Earth despite its substance being easily blown about.
So the main difference here is that, whereas the metal bowl is solid and rigid, the air is not.
In fact, in regard to the atmosphere, the basic problem for the ancients was essentially no different than is ours today. Today we take for granted that what we are taught about the sky implies that the sky itself provides too little direct information as to the substance, and upper extent, of its daylit blue.
Thus we remain cognitively passive in regard to what we personally physically perceive of the sky.
…We presuppose that those perceptions cannot really help us determine the upper extent of that daylit blue.
So the cultural effects of clear photos of the atmosphere taken from orbit are not necessarily only those of a constructive nature. They are iconic not just of our collective advanced empirical knowledge. They also are effectively representative of our individual modern-chauvinistic ignorance.