When we're talking about industrial revolution type of stuff, there is a whole train of dependencies that I suspect would have been difficult to speed up a lot. Maybe if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed though you could make arguments both ways given the Roman Empire as a slave society didn't necessarily need a lot of labor saving devices.
The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the will to put them into practice were probably more in realms like health/medicine. Even a lot of science, your hypothetical time traveler might have been "right" but in many cases would have no way to prove it.
It could be a pretty nice 'coffee table book': a walk through history of inventions, with the dependencies of each one listed (to one or maybe two degrees only of course).
You could pick it up anywhere, read forwards; back from something specific (or forward, if you made it a doubly linked list?); or back from whatever 'the end' would be.
It would be interesting to see if there's a way this dependency graph could be captured and saved for future generations in the event of civilisation collapsing. I suspect something like that would rapidly reduce the time it takes for society to rebuild because it wouldn't have to spend energy figuring out what doesn't work all over again as much.
Hell, even today if a CME or something wipes out our electronics we'll have to go way back to vacuum tubes or even simpler setups to restore our society since most modern electronics need modern electronics to be designed and manufactured.
Most Romans (excluding the salves who were not Romans despite being the majority in Rome) would have been better off with a good steam engine. However before you get to good you need to go through a lot of working toys that are not worth having. Tractors (tractors have replaced almost half historical human labor, with various automated spinning/weaving machines most of the rest - everything else done by humans, slaves or not is a footnote) are vastly better than slaves, but there is a reason when John Deere bought a tractor company in 1918 they wrote all their dealers something to the effect of the horse drawn plow will always be the backbone of the American farm - early tractors were not better than human labor in general.
The genuine innovations that mostly just needed ideas and the will to put them into practice were probably more in realms like health/medicine. Even a lot of science, your hypothetical time traveler might have been "right" but in many cases would have no way to prove it.