> fair bunch of scientific and technological breakthroughs

Outside of military technologies they had massively fallen behind the west by the 80s. Without the western tech they licensed or copied they were permanently stuck in the 50s. Even their crappy cars were licensed copies of cheap European cars from the 60s.

When it comes to consumer electronics, vehicles and a bunch of other things they were comically behind. So it’s really not a good example..

> monopolizes technologies and ossifies development.

As bad as it might be empirical evidence shows that historically a superior system has never existed (it might be feasible but everything that was tried underperformed).