It's also what's crippling progress in many places in Eastern Europe. Depressed wages and fighting on price only to be assembly plant for higher-tech components does not let you build local prosperity, it makes you fungible cheap labour.
EE is full of entitled elderly pensioners that control the narrative and are only interested in returning to the "good old times of communism" in one way or another.
Prosperity requires stepping out of your comfort zone and implement ideas that bring competitive advantage over your neighbors. These kind of ideas are lumped in the same category like LGBT rights, climate etc etc.
Because also the political and education system in communism couldn't create any visionary technocrats focused on innovation and exports.
It simply encouraged cronyism, lying, backstabbing, empire building, fiefdoms and thievery from the same zero-sum pie aka the local national economy.
Well educated and innovative workers from Taiwan or South Korea weren't sent to the gulags or political prisons for "free thinking" or for coming from the wrong family backgrounds.
The alternative for eastern Europeans always was to go to UK or Germany and be a fungible labour there.
Current strategy increased quality of life in EE countries. So far that in main cities in Poland housing prices are 4000-5000 USD per square meter.
And while it's better to be with work than without, living paycheck to paycheck in fear is not that great either, and doesn't exactly provide ways out. So sometimes we're left with just what solidarity we can arrange without legal representation, like the time entirety of one of my former workplaces left the job one day for what american management did to one of them.
Poles are entrepreneurial and forward thinking nation that will sooner or later become economically as prosperous as WE.
We on the other hand will always be discount version of Austria/Germany.
EE was basically bankrupt in the early 90's. How could they have caught up to join the wealthy innovation driven countries like UK, Netherlands, Germany and Nordics, on mere fractions of their education and research budgets and considering the massive social damage 45 years of communism has done to eradicate free thinking, innovation and entrepreneurship. Basically, post 1989, nobody had any idea how to run a business, how to do market research, marketing, sales, any of that, let alone build businesses that could challenge wealthy established players from the west, since none of that was taught in schools and universities during communism and now you have to catch up with over 45 years of lost progress over night.
It was just not possible at the time, so being cheap outsourcing labor was the only choice to get out of poverty.
That left those countries without any local champions or easy options to elevate themselves. I've said it many many times that it will take dozens of unicorns like UIPath in Romania to offset the loss of industries now dominated by DACH companies.
Romania would need to become another Singapore which is almost impossible.
There was surprisingly a lot of free thinking, innovation, even entrepreneurship. Not everything was as bad as it was painted, not everything was as good as it was sometimes shown.
One of the rare positive elements in all that chaos that some had pointed out and I agree was that the chaos at least ensured consumer goods were better represented and prevented oligarchic centralisation to the level that happened in some other countries.