The first coal powered steam machines were very inefficient. They only made sense at all being sited in an actual coal mine where coal was being extracted for thermal heating, so the fuel was abundant and cheap. Yet they were still barely worth it. From that they were iterated on, but it still took time for them to be made efficiently enough to work economically outside of the mine the fuel came from.

This points to the industrial revolution not being clear progress but requiring specific starting conditions. Steam machines had been around as a curiosity for a long time. And there's no guarantee there would have been slower progress to similar electrical technology without coal/steam because those things also accelerated the development of metallurgy and precision manufacturing specifically. Coal powered machines got efficiency with better precision made iron and steel, coincidentally things that required coal to make.

So I doubt we'd be where we are without coal, it might go further as without coal and the specific circumstances of coal access and necessity on the home island of a nation that has become an economic powerhouse by conquest.

But we can't run the world again. Hopefully we can bounce up to the next level and drop the majority of fossil fuel dependence. We've been pretty dumb about it imo in that we know there are potentially massive downsides too continuing to use it like we are, and we know there are areas like air transport that might have no alternative, so smart would be to transition everything as fast as possible to preserve the niche uses.