I think everyone agrees with your point that our neighbors are also chasing us from afar and as time passes eventually they would approach us. Now is the important juncture for Malaysians to decide whether we wish to leave them even further or let them overtake us. We have problems like extreme religiosity that I fear will hamper development, and race relation that's not improving at all.
But ld further in saying  Thats partly because they started from lower base. So as they become richer they are also reaping the benefits.  Vietnam opened up their economy and now is building second tallest building in asean. But corruption is still rife, they're reaching gov debt threshold now so they can't be forever spending like crazy. Their mrt projects suffer sooo many problems.. Took almost  10 years to build and still not finishing. And China is major problem too. They dare go vs China.
Indonesia is spending like crazy for infra ,Building 3 lrt and 1 mrt at the same time. Tolled roads everywhere. But they also suffer own problems, they're really needing to spend  a lot to cover their swath of land mass and they also have limited money. Not only is their inflation high, their electricity bills and oil subsidies are also taking its toll on their population. Imagine indonesian average income but payinlg water bills and Electricity bills that are even higher by malaysian standard  .
They took 8% interest rate from local banks to fund their lrts project and from what i heard they don't do feasibility study about their economy impacts. So highly likely that these mrts and lrts will go bankrupt like what we had with our lrt putra and Star lrt plus monorail. In msia gov can just throw bonds and sukuk, and will be sold like pisang goreng  . There, not so much. Their sovereign rating is not any better.

Will continue about thailand tomorrow.