Superior-but-expensive materials are still more expensive (that is, require more effort to build). So you won’t find people stringing powerlines everywhere, even if it’s technically possible.
I agree that people could develop alternatives to metals, but they’d still lag way behind Earth in technology, in the same way that if we dump megatonnes of Material X on Earth 2, they’d be ahead of Earth.
The reason we’ve spend millenia developing metallurgy because metals are the best solution for hundreds and thousands of applications. Take away that solution and solutions are still possible, but they’re going to be inferior in some way. And this means that the opportunity costs to develop alternative technologies are greater than the opportunity costs to develop metallurgy, which is another way of saying people are poorer.
Take the metal-poor world, and if aliens or elves give them the gift of megatonnes of steel, copper and aluminum they’re going to be much better off.
The other point is that the industrial revolution wasn’t, in my opinion, something inevitable. Yes we’ve had steadily increasing technology, even during the middle ages. But China or India or the Ottomans weren’t on the verge of an Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. The potential applications for steam engines just weren’t recognized until long after steam engines were built, when people realized that you could convert watermills and windmills to steam power.
Anyway, I imagine without metals we’d have a lot more local power generation, and direct use of mechanical power. Factories would cluster much closer around power sources. So you could build the Grand Coulee Dam, but you’d probably set up factories on site run directly by mechanical energy rather than convert the hydropower to electricity and run powerlines to population centers.
The other problem with this scenario is no railroads, which limits cheap shipping to water transport. Can large cities be supplied efficiently without rail? Obviously coastal cities are fine, but interior cities are at a huge disadvantage.