I think there's a temptation to subscribe to a "progress is inevitable and recency is a reflection of quality" view, especially amongst tech-oriented people. I

I think there's a temptation to subscribe to a "progress is inevitable and recency is a reflection of quality" view, especially amongst tech-oriented people. I think this is very similar to discussions of payments in the US vs China, with QR codes vs credit cards. Credit cards are old tech now, and so a country building out a ton of infrastructure today has no real reason to follow that path now that there are alternatives. But a country with a ton of infrastructure already built for them also doesn't have much incentive to rip all that out and replace it. So something primarily determined by "what was the state of tech when building out infrastructure for the first time" now gets used to answer a question of "who is a more advanced society?" (Here it's more a question of "what were influential design trends" instead of "when did you build your infrastructure" but that's a similarly arbitrary starting seed, as it were, not a reflection of "progress.")