@Background Pony #AB38
It’s always good to overcome adversity, but it’s generally considered even better to avoid suffering said adversity in the first place.
In the early years of “Friendship is Magic”, there was a statement from one of the staff to the effect of “If you see something that looks more advanced than your garden variety pre-industrial fantasy world, assume it’s powered by magic”. Which would mean that ponies of all tribes used products of magic extensively in their daily lives, which in turn means that having all the magic go AWOL would have been the equivalent of hitting our world with a planetary-scale EMP.
It’s true that the ponies recovered (most of them, anyhow), but they would have had to start from scratch with much of their technology - it likely would have taken several generations just to get back to the quality of life we saw in G4. Besides, imagine what they could have achieved if they had been able to keep on developing - more sophisticated examples of combining magic and technology would have been much much cooler than fancier real-world technology.