Lack of protectionist measures has never made a country wealthy, and has been something that the imperial core push onto the countries in the periphery.

The closest thing to a counter-example in this instance are countries with a small population and disproportionately large commodity reserves. Australia for an instance could just fund itself exporting minerals, whereas the same strategy makes Brazil a comparatively poor country. It is self evident why. Both countries are comparable in, say, iron reserves but the latter has something like 9 times more people to employ and invest in.

Other counter examples are either like Chile's copper reserves - which always comes with caveats like 'not counting the cost of living' and 'least terrible of an impoverished region' - or something like Norway's energy reserves, which does serve as a more egalitarian example. Some people might disagree and lodge the standard complaints about the nordic model (I agree with them), but Norway is still not run like a purely extractive latin american dictatorship.

It is nonetheless true that industrial capitalism cannot exist without industrial policy. And that, historically, countries have had to deal with foreign first mover advantages via protectionism. This essentially means you're exploiting your own population in the short term in order to build something for the future. And it is what both succcessful (USA, Germany) and unsuccesssful (Egypt, Brazil) countries did.