Well there are plenty of countries that aren't facing those conditions now, or in the recent past and still have shitty economies. It undersells how hard it is to build a strong economy and therefore undersells how hard Poland has worked.
You can provide cheap labor inside of a trading block and still be economically a mess, Mexico comes to mind and Turkey was sending workers to parts of Europe starting in the late 1940s. Poland did a lot more than just supply cheap labor, and it really undersells all of the work they've put in to develop their work force, education, economic policies, and so on.
