It’s an interesting accident of history that Gutenberg was able to make the innovations he did, and thereby ignite the explosive popularity of movable type in the West. If the Roman empire hadn’t brought the Latin alphabet in its various forms to so much of Europe, it’s possible that a less modular script would have dominated—leading to the same problems that plagued Chinese printing.

Of course, abjads and syllabaries are as common (and about as modular) as alphabets, so it’s likely that we would have been fine either way. Still, it’s interesting to think of what Europe would be like if the predominant script were semantophonetic like Chinese. Oddly enough, the main reason that phonemic scripts exist is precisely because languages tend to be non-isolating—in other words, modularity in a language leads to non-modularity in its orthography, and vice versa.