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Notes -
Europe had such an advantage because of its technological worldview stemming from the influence of Western Christianity. There's a historical pattern where technology gets invented in China or the middle east or somewhere, gets used marginally, and then is brought back to Europe by Italian traders, where the guildsmen perfect it and Europeans adopt it en masse. Your link talks about firearms, and fair, they're an immediately militarily relevant example. But it also applies to the printing press(literally perfected mostly due to the Roman Catholic Church's habit of buying every copy of relevant books they could get their hands on leading to a supply crunch- the printing press only makes sense as a technology when large clients are placing bulk orders), spinning wheels, and clocks. Spinning wheels in particular is worth paying attention to because it was work done by low-status women who weren't willing to do sex work, the cheapest labour in any society that has ever existed, including ours. Europeans just really liked new technology and mechanization.
Isn't it also that when you've got a ton of different kingdoms and principalities and duchies and fiefs and city-states, that it's a lot easier to find someone willing to take a chance on a new technology (and then once adopted, it'll spread) than convincing a single strong ruler choosing to adopt and spread a new and potentially destabilizing technology?
The pattern was well established before India and thé Islamic world became consolidated, and east Asia also went through significant fragmentation during the era.
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