I was in south east Poland for the last 2 weeks and the cafes I went to there were definitely a cut above what I’m used to in the UK.
The article doesn’t mention how good the roads and rail have become. When I first went to Poland about 20 years ago I spent all day on a train that stopped at farm fields and travelled no faster than 20mph. The main roads I drove on were hilariously bad, utterly destroyed by long lines of HGV trucks. Even many roads in more affluent areas like around Krakow were poorly engineered (flooding).
The roads this time were massively better. I still found plenty of old bad roads in more rural areas but the top tier roads (autostrada) are better than anything we have in the UK. The tier below that are generally better than most motorways current state of repair in the Uk - but it helps that the Polish high speed roads (~120kph - where the top tier autostrada are 140kph) are just better designed.
Now there’s high speed high quality rail (again quite a bit better than my experience in the UK), maybe the old PkP rolling stock is still there somewhere but I only saw modern high speed or freight trains.