For the record: Faerun, and the Sword Coast in particular, are, economically and technologically, designed to be comparable to a roughly western european setting, as of the late middle-ages, and that is and has been an established element of the realms' core lore since first edition - literally every source that ever describes this and draws a parallel or analogy, draws this one, because that is what it is pitched as, directly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faerunhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_RealmsFictional culture and technology
Economically and technologically, Faerûn is comparable to Western Europe during the late Middle Ages, giving most new players using this campaign setting an intuitive grasp of the way the society functions.
The realms as a whole are extremely culturally and ethnically diverse, and if we were set in Chult, or in Kara-Tur, or Maztica, this would be different - then we'd be in fantasy equivalents of ancient african or east asian cultures.... but we're on the Sword Coast, which is a close approximation in terms of its culture, economy and technological level as being of late middle-age western Euope, and has always been established as such.
