This _has_ been something that's been argued-- but to be asserted doesn't make something "true"; it makes it an argument which rises or falls based on the data we can or can't find to support it.

So, for example, just this year the Vanderbilt historian William Caferro published Petrarch's War which includes some contrary data. The problem with this kind of economic history is that there were no prospectively defined data series, rather contemporary historians have to go back and find data. Now here's the awkward part-- if you've got an attractive hypothesis, like, let's say "plague killed off labor, now surviving labor is able to bargain for higher wages and we have the beginnings of the Renaissance" . . . and you find some data like, say, records of what a particular religious organization was paying workmen to build a cathedral, which seem to confirm your thesis, you grab hold of that data.

Not only do you grab hold of that data, but it gets cited and recited, and before long you've created a scholarly edifice that looks a whole lot stronger than the cherry picked data that backs it is.

Caferro was writing about a minor conflict in the mid-14th century, Florence's war with the Ubaldini, during and just after the plague. And we've got an abundant record of wages that were paid to the mercenary soldiers employed and curiously they don't increase at all in the period, in fact there's some decline. If the story is "plague kills off men, remaining men get paid more"-- why aren't these mercenaries getting paid more?

Moreover, for the Florentines at the time, the plague seemed substantially less important to them than the War; which suggests that it was less dramatic than we've understood it to be, at least in this time and place.

So what does that tell us?

That we have to be _very_ careful about what we infer from these retrospectively defined data sets.

So the answer to your question:

"To what extent is that interpretation true"

-- is "There's an argument for it, but there's contrary evidence too." A middle ground would be to say that this was a factor, but we can't actually tell how significant a factor it was.

and to your second question

Is it conceivable that Europe could have made similar strides towards the 'modern' world almost a millenia before the Black death after the Plague of Justinian?

-- which layers hypothetical on top of hypothetical. There's no necessary reason that Rome/China/the Ottoman Empire didn't have a technological revolution. They all _could have_, and I don't think that the presence or absence of plague mattered. What made "the great divergence"? A lot of factors, and a lot of luck-- trying to make it deterministic; that runs counter to what we know of history. Kenneth Pomeranz cataloged some of the advantages that separated the West from other civilizations, a lot more than labor economics.

See:

Caferro, William. "Petrarch's War" (Oxford University Press: 2019)

Pomeranz, Kenneth "The Great Divergence" (Princeton University Press: 2000)