Taiwan did take off, and
is also not in East Asia.
Malaysia was as rich as South Korea in the 1980s; it's not as rich now because it's had some really bad economic policy, like overinvesting in roads in order to encourage people to buy cars from the state-owned automakers where South Korea kept suppressing consumption until the 1990s in order to promote exports. But even then, Malaysia is about as rich as the better-off parts of Eastern Europe, like Poland and the Baltics. I think generally
people underrate how rich Malaysia is and how rich Indonesia is (Indonesia is about comparable in GDP per capita to China) because of crypto-racism from Chinese people. Western ideas of race in East and Southeast Asia are filtered through a Chinese lens, and the Chinese racial discourse holds that there's a superior Chinese race and an inferior Malayo-Polynesian race, so obviously it's inconceivable the Malays could be living in not-poverty.