Only possible with a pretty early PoD that would make a VERY peripheral area the center of development, like sub-saharan Africa, Australia or the Americas. In that case it would probably be used akin to North America - dumping ground for surplus population, as we don't have any extremely notable resources, apart from manpower, and that would be changed with the PoD, with population densities of Asia plummeting too
If your vision of colonization resembles that of the experience of the Americas, maybe.
Otherwise, I wouldn't say that. Even as late as the 1800s, its possible. Given say Bengal or Egypt a little luck or rather, spare them some of the tragedies, it's not unquestionable to see colonization of Europe in domination of markets and reorientation of society towards a new metropole.
Imagine if someone besides the Qing got a hold of the Mandate of Heaven in the 1640s. China was hitting stride in a serious way, with economic dynamism, an expanding population, risk-spreading financial techniques, and the development of wage labor were appearing. Or Egypt being a sly more fiscally responsible and maybe not wasted money in wars in Sudan. Keep the British on their back foot in India and Bengal or Mysore could have more breathing room. These are with PODs after 1600 which create economic cores on a competitive level with European powers. Though there were places in say 1750 in Europe that were unlikely not to be economic cores, a lot of places were still semiperipheral economically, and in some places refeudalizing/becoming less developed like Poland, the Balkans, and parts of Italy. The latter two might be of great importance to an Egypt converting from a primarily subsistence agrarian economy to an industrial economy. Such a growing market may be irresistible to land-owners outside of Thessalonika or in Sicily, who can get some stable income selling food product to Alexandria.
iOTL European states wishing to trade with China sent tribute, often submitting (at least initially) to stringent conditions, and always under threat from Chinese armed forces not inexperienced with ejecting large populations from their territory. Imagine a sea-focused, boisterous China looking to expand its market rather than a cautious, land-focused Empire obsessed with stability. iOTL moderately sized Chinese forces were enough to eject Europeans from major strongholds like Formosa and Penghu, and as late as 1886 were patrolling all under heaven, and could give the Japanese a bloody nose. A China willing to assert global power would be just that, a
global power. Access to upwards of 17% of the global economy is a pretty good incentive to roll over for the hegemon, which is why so many states gave tribute to trade.
There are indeed even useful things beyond human labor and markets. If you, as many societies have done in the pursuit of wealth, ignore knock on effects ecologically, hydrologically, etc. then there are quite a number of useful crops that grow well in Yurp. Hemp/Cannabis, Cotton, Tobacco, Tomatoes, Potatoes, Opium, Sugarbeets, Okra, Peanuts, Sorghum, Corn, Wheat, and many more. If society were oriented away from domestic consumption, there's no telling how abstractly monstrous the cultivation of anyone of these plants could become. There's fisheries so abundant it took industrialization to start localized extinction events, as well as whaling, and
other seafood (Sea Cucumbers among other aquaculture could be quite lucrative, I mean the sea cucumber trade was lucrative enough to link Fiji to China and help create an entirely new system of slavery). On top of that, there's minable and sea salt, one of the main ingredients for humans. Silver, coal, and zinc deposits aren't negligible either. Silver in particular was a very popular.
Also prestige/missionary work.
With PoDs much further back you can have much more explicitly unequal and unambiguously colonial relations between an European and a Non-European state.