That is probably true, but if you can't mine iron, tin, lead, copper, gold, silver, cobalt, lithium, etc cause the easy deposits are all mined out or get petroleum from a surface pool, can you really jumpstart modern society? We'd be back to hunting whales for oil and ambergris and plowing fields with shit.
Though granted just knowing about medicine, micobiology, and good recycling tech could probably get a well located society up to an early industrial age pretty quickly. But it was combustion and steam engines that replaced slaves as the source of labor, without those it's gonna be 90% of the human population back into the manual labor pool doing the hard work yet again.