Correct.

In fact, I personally believe that "catching up" is underrated when it comes to impact on human progress.

Directly, it is a much lower hanging fruit than pushing the frontier forward as it is easier to go through existing levels of technological development. Additionally, it helps the existing state of the art scale faster since the user base will grow larger.

Indirectly, it also supports novel technological development since it increases the proportion of the global population living at the state of the art and therefore capable of making contributions to improve upon it.