When you look at cultural evolution, certain trends do appear to be almost inevitable, given a certain set of demographic, geographic, and ecological conditions. Farming, social stratification, urbanization, writing, and states have independently evolved throughout the world when conditions favored it.
I do not believe industrialization and high technology is necessarily one of those things. It only evolved in one place (Europe), and did not occur in other civilized areas which were as advanced or more advanced for a much longer time (some of which even experimented with some of the technological precursors of modern technology). Get rid of Europe, and I am unconvinced we would not still be living in civilized "iron age" societies which still depended predominantly on animal power, human power, and other mechanical aids (pulleys, sails,wheels, wind/water mills, etc) for everything.
The problem of comparing industrialization with farming, social stratification, urbanization, writing, and states is the following: all these didn't have an
inmediate global effect. If farming (or any of the others) had the same effects as industrialization, it would have happened only once. In that case, the first people who developped farming (or social stratification, urbanization or writing) would have conquered or dominated the rest of the peoples of the world. If we had lived in such a TL,, we might consider these advances as unique events, as they would have happened only once (at least originally).
But that didn't happened. Farming, social stratification, urbanization and writing gave the peoples who invented them predominance over their neighbours. But the peoples who were far away weren't affected by these. They had time (thousands of years) to invent this for their own. Mesoamericans, for example, invented all these entirely independently.
The industrial revolution had inmediate effects worldwide. If its effects could somehow have been limeted to western Europe, it might have happened elsewhere independently. While there was no sign that in the late XVIII another part of the world was about to industrialize on its own, who can assure that Japan, China or India wouldn't be industrialized by the year 3000 if Europeans had been killed by a plague? Japan, for example, was quite comparable to late medieval Europe. What would had happened there if left alone?
This doesn't mean industrialization is inevitable. I think nothing is inevitable, even agriculture. But saying that industrialization is inevitable
because it happened only once IOTL, unlike farming, social stratification, urbanization, writing isn't accurate. Industrialization, given it's nature, would ALWAYS happen once, in almost any TL. It have happen in China, India, Europe or somewhere else. But once it happens there, that region will dominate the world. Other places might industrialize, and even surpass the regiuon where industrializatiuon startes; but they will be copying the starters.
That's what makes it hard to determinate what's necessary to industrialization. For example, we know that having domesticated animals isn't a pre-requisite for urbanization, as Mesoamericans had cities without having domesticated animals. But we can't know for sure if banking is a pre-requisite for industrialization, just because it predated it in the British case.