That’s an important point, people always compare growth as if growing from the bottom is as hard as growing from (close to) the top. People love to do this with India and china.

That's true - the counter-counterexample is Singapore where GDP/capita shot straight past western European countries and just kept going. They do have the significant advantage of being English speaking though

Singapore also has the advantage of being a significant financial hub. But that only works when being small, it doesn’t scale to something like the EU.