I have my theories around this - but also worth remembering that early governments didn't really understand modern economics or a knowledge economy - the most recentl iteration of Chinese government is only a few decades old and even they have been regressing in terms of institutions with nothing positive to show for it.

The Deng Xiaoping -> Hu Jintao period had a lot more achievements then the period prior or after and at that time the CCP was relatively more open and more rules-based rather than personality based.

In the long arc - I think successful governments needs meritocracy, which has both a technocratic and a democratic component. The technocratic component is needed to make sure things are executed well and complex problems are well understood - and the democratic component is needed so that the technocrats don't become divorced from reality and turn into a kleptocratic elite that starts acting against the benefit of the majority.

This doesn't necessarily mean a 1-man-1-vote standard democratic system - but you do need a government that is responsive to the public in some form. In Singapore for e.g. you can't really call it a democracy but the state is quite responsive to public issues. On the other hand you can have a kind of democracy where you don't really have a lot of competence which will lead to people choosing idiotic self destructive policies. Most successful advancing countries have found some balance between these two.

There are entire Native American/African tribes which were probably wiped completely out with ~100s of deaths. We probably don't know much about them because they didn't have expansive empires or significant written histories of such conflicts.

We probably still do cultural eradication of small groups like this every few years even today as society modernizes.

Going back into history the early european settlers were almost completely eradicated by the invading proto-indo-europeans (90%+ genetic replacement on the Y-chromosome).