Sure, the British aristocratic class did exploit the working class. But then we're no longer talking about geographies.
So why was India's development status comparable to Thailand in that case?
"A good counterpoint to Thailand is Britain becoming insanely wealthy by contemporary standard during Victorian era."
Britain was the first country to industrialize. Switzerland and the US also industrialized early, and did not have a massive colonial population to exploit. But you can see their per-capita GDP was still in the same neighborhood as the UK in the late 1800s:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-p...
A lot of stories that Indians tell about their history fall apart when you look at the data. You can argue that Britain delayed India's industrialization, but since most of Asia was not industrializing at the time, it's a bit of a dubious argument. I have little doubt that Britain exploited India, but I don't think it was a historically exceptional type of exploitation.
A debate does exist around the how much of India's decline can be attributed to the British as fragmentation of central political authority started long before British arrival.
US and Switzerland had their respective advantages like large domestic market and high value industries. The population of these nations had the time to learn and adapt. The familiarity to western education obviously helped as transferring IP was relatively easy. These opportunities were absent in company ruled India(things did improve marginally once the crown took over). I would largely agree British colonial rule was not exceptional when compared to other mercantile colonies. But I do not see the similarities to Mughal rule of India where the wealth stayed in-house and was even invested locally, the key difference being assimilation vs extraction.