I agree there are multiple factors that eventually converged.
Metal - metal was always expensive to mine, smelt, and shape. Iron, particularly, required an immense amount of heat. So all metals were precious. Greek columns, for example, held together by lead clips - when times got unsettled, scavengers would chip those bits out of the buildings. The idea that you could produce enough metal to lay miles of iron rails across the countryside and not have anyone sneak over and steal them in the night was a pipe (!) dream.
Energy - to produce that level of metal to make reliable machines, required massive amounts of energy. I have a book on industrial archaeology, mentions the crude iron smelters of New Jersey. there was a ramp to the top of the furnace to dump wood in. After a decade or two, the massive woods were cleared for miles around. Is it any surprise the industrial revolution happened in places where (coal) energy was abundant? So too, slavery negated the need for serious labour-saving devices, if it wasn’t your labour. A steam gizmo to turn the wheel in a mill was useless if you needed slaves to scour the countryside to bring the wood to feed it. It’s no surprise the first use of originally very inefficient steam engines was to help pump out coal mines,
I’ll add to that climate. Northern Europe particularly but the area in general benefits from a fairly wet climate that allows a reliable food source, wood for construction and building the earlier machines. The windmills that drained the Netherlands polders, for example, were a rare example of mechanization with immense benefit. Romans built catapults of wood, but Italy was not as much renowned for big forests. In northern Europe, they were right there, not a long way off in Lebanon. And in a more temperate climate, there were less issues with diseases common in the tropics.
Science - the experimental method cannot be underestimated. Science in the middle ages consisted of quoting the classical experts. Who were you to think you knew better than Galen or Archimedes or Aristotle? Once one group started to show things were not all as was believed, it opened the door. And as mentioned, a middle/upper class with the leisure to “fiddle” or meditate and then experiment was a bonus, so moderately rich stable economies helped. (Not to mention the social mobility implied in a middle class, where by using one’s cleverness, you could hope to earn a richer lifestyle).
Printing - and perhaps, unsettled politics - the ability to disseminate knowledge rapidly, to broadcast it across the continent, more than anything created an “arms race” of knowledge. Two people at the same time argued over who created calculus. The existence of multiple independent states made it harder to suppress unpopular learning or suppress actions that competed with state monopolies (think Britain’s salt monopoly in India, the colonial trade restrictions, Spain’s monopolies in the New World, or many similar royal decrees over time, which carried no weight beyond limited borders), and the decline of Rome’s power with the Reformation added to that - things mentioned as an aside in scripture could be ignored. Each step built on the previous.
An interesting book on this subject is Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. It discusses why Europe won the race to become an industrial powerhouse over many other areas; and suggests luck in having the right convergence of resource, more than any factor, helped. The important thing to understand is that it was a growing accumulation of all the pieces needed in a steadying rush. The printing press was centuries before the industrial revolution. The scientific rush started with the renaissance, in the 1500’s. The age of exploration demanded bigger and better ships and navigation, well before the steam engine.
)