In the meantime.
The second chapter of the first volume of the New Cambridge History talks about "The Barbarian Invasion" and coincidentally a paragraph there adds to my point of "depends where" above. It says in the past how they viewed the barbarian invasion (which was largely blamed for the fall of Rome) in western Europe had two versions. Germans and English due to their Germanic roots saw that in positive light, while fellow Romance speaking historians found a catastrophe in the event. The names they used of the that era also sums up this well: Völkerwanderungen vs. les invasions barbares.
So beside what I personally noticed, there could be other angles to approach the question, from country by country differences can exist.
I was thinking about the old Marxist approach of the communism to this. They saw Rome as a classic slaver society, then feudalism brought a step forward for the proletarians to gain their freedom - no doubt due to their heroic class struggles -, since serfdom was one level above slavery. So Early Medieval must have been more positive than Antiquity when the total exploitation of the proletariat was done. Actually I remember the Athenian people's fight to power, similarly the struggle between the plebs and the patricians in the Roman republic, both presented as a victory for the oppressed masses.
I copypaste a few lines here from the chapter I mentioned because it's hilarious:
In particular, the Germanic barbarians, who include most of the migrating groups, and are still often seen as unified by some kind of proto-German ethos or nationality, migrate along tortuously winding routes, represented in historical atlases as a spaghetti-like confusion of coloured arrows, to their eventual goals, almost as if these were predestined.