Two thoughts.
If the relevant factor is dear labor and cheap materials, then it should be surprising (on Allen’s model) that there was innovation in post America across a wide variety of domains? This was the height of unionized labor and also of American access to cheap commodities (but not finished products, so being able to solve the expensive part happening here still matters), which should affect a pretty wide set of domains.
In terms of thinking of the vibes—whether we end up as compatibilists or hard determinists—I think it’s worth distinguishing between “we can locate culture somewhere on this causal graph” and “culture is not on this causal graph.”
In order to say “you don’t have to posit a uniquely British culture of innovation to explain the industrial revolution” I don’t think it’s necessary to say “culture never matters.” Instead you can have a mix of “culture is affected by (e.g.) economic forces” and “culture, at least around basic vibes like optimism, risk tolerance, and individualism, doesn’t independently vary all that radically.” A plausible model to me might posit a lot of individual variation in vibes-propensity that exists in any human society, economic factors that make any given set of vibes relatively successful at the margin or not, and then emulation of successful strategies. So optimism matters, and if aliens hit early modern England with a clinical depression ray that would have real effects; it’s just that you can find natural optimists and natural pessimists in most situations, and people who are neither will see through a mix of emulation and trial and error how much optimism is justified. This fits with the pretty clear cultural differences we see between foraging, farming, and industrial societies (although admittedly the case is strongest in the case of agricultural civilization—foragers are pretty diverse we don’t have multiple independently developed industrial civilizations!)
When I question my intuitions about paperclip-loving humans, one thing that makes them less threatening is 1) an intuition that they’re implementing—whether by mere hobbyistic delight or ideological fanatacism or both—a variation of the plasticity of human values 2) a bearish take on their ability to negate that plasticity and ensure that all anyone cares about is paperclippers forever.
Re: 1 when I imagine the paperclip enthusiasts, I imagine social media posts talking about how particular brands or styles of paperclips appeal to them, philosophical justifications for why paperclips should be maximized, different sects of paperclip maximizers who scorn each other as not the real thing, simple appreciation of paperclips and complex feelings associated with it, heroes who are admired for their contributions to the paperclipping project, still caring somewhat about friends and sex and physical comfort and so on. These and similar features seem pretty universal to human aesthetic, political, and religious movements, and they bake in elements of humanity that I care about and would prefer to keep existing. Presumably classical Clippy doesn’t care about any of these things except perhaps instrumentally and is just implementing a sole “maximize paperclips” function. Evolved aliens probably care about at least a few of them, or things that are analogous to feel “intrinsically valuable” to me, even if they also really really care about paperclips.
If Nazis took over the world and implemented their preferred policies and raised everyone who was allowed to survive with Nazi values, that would be very bad (duh.) But if we’re restricting ourselves to 20th century technology in this example, I’m not worried that their vision of the future would last forever, or even the advertised thousand years; my guess is that the great^n-grandchildren (possibly with a very low n) of the Nazi victors would look back and say “yeah, that was really bad” and that future Nazi-descended civilizations would keep varying around the human baseline: most less nice than they could be but nicer than Nazis. Collecting paperclips is way less bad than the Holocaust (duh), but implemented on human hardware I wouldn’t expect it to last forever either.