So if we were the first large life to form on the planet, and there weren't any fossil fuels, I think we'd be screwed. I think we would've stalled until something burned us as fuel.
What about wood, or more "advanced" biofuels (idk, some kind of highly productive grass or a refined algae product), prevents us from developing wind and hydro power? Those were both developed before fossil fuels were widely used anyway. They produced mechanical power instead of electrical, but only because electricity was not understood yet.
The more energy you have, the easier it is to scale energy production up, but you have the resources required to initiate that process with just biofuels. And once you have a base of wind and hydro energy, that allows you to begin the feedback loop of using that energy to assist in constructing more power generation in a virtuous cycle.
edit: I'll also add that the industrial revolution came about after there had already been notable advances in mechanization and manufacturing - the introduction of fossil fuels quite literally threw gas on the fire, but people had started developing increasingly sophisticated machinery like the cotton gin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin) and mechanically-powered loom (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancashire_Loom) before fossil fuels started being widely used. And indeed, many of these were hydro-powered.
Advances you mention in your third paragraph don't include the jumps in precision that were predicated on this capability, and indeed necessary for the next steps.
There may of course be some civilisations out there that managed what you're describing - it's a big ol' universe after all - but my gut feel is mitochondria is probably the great filter, rather than an abundance of energy-dense naturally occurring fuel.
This link pops up regularly on HN. It's a spectacularly good read, highly relevant here, in terms of the necessary set of converging prerequisites for an industrial revolution:
https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...
I appreciate I only have a sample size of one - but then, so does the 'it's no big deal' crowd.
On this planet we have no alternative routes to the same outcome, and no clear evidence that alternative routes a) couldn't have come about, or b) did but were subsequently out-competed.
I suggest everyone with a Fermi-opinion is in the same camp - massively speculative and a single datapoint (unless you count the myriad (in their absence) counter-points).
But yes, "worship" is not quite the right word for whatever obsession it is that people have with mitochondria.
Once you have sufficient electrical power, you can heat things in other ways - for example, aluminum smelting requires even higher temperatures than steel and uses electricity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium_smelting.
The title of the piece is Could we reboot a modern civilisation without fossil fuels?, and is well worth the read.
So, sure, yeah, aluminium melts at about 650 degrees (I considered this fact when looking at aluminium pizza trays for my oven, which can, though rarely does, go beyond 450) and is smelted about 150 more than that.
But in order to smelt it you of course need receptacles that won't melt at that temperature - ie, steel (plus insulation). I was off by a couple of hundred degrees in my earlier comment - steel smelting is around 1300-1500 degrees. So we're back to the original problem.
As to wind and hydro, sure, yes, you can easily generate power from those, as we did for millennia using mostly timber constructs. Though I'm not sure if you're suggesting getting electrical power from those sources is easy, absent some sophisticated technological capabilities (wire-making, for starters).
Oil may not have been used much before the latter half of the 19th century, but coal certainly was.