For nearly all of human history everyone thought that those frog vs. human eyes were completely separate and designed by some magical being living up in the cloud.

By noticing that while they have significant differences, those structures also have significant similarities, we were able to correctly answer one of the greatest questions of all time: where did humans come from?

Of all models, this one is particularly useful.

To be useful models must accurately represent some aspect of reality, Reptiles don’t seem to represent the brain of our common assessor particularly well. So this model is as wildly wrong as describing volcanism as the bowel movement of animals. Yes, they pass significant material through a small opening, not it’s not a useful model.

As I have mentioned before these structures are very different, compare the giant spheres used by snakes, bird, frog etc to process visual information and try and map that to a rodent, bat, or human. Hint you’re not going to be able to locate an obvious sphere because the fundamental morphology is just different.

Eyes are a good example of conservation and path dependence, development is initiated by a fairly highly conserved gene:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PAX6#Species_distribution

Being reasonably conserved has minimal predictive power. Yes, knocking it or a closely related gene out out harms eye formation in a wide range of species but it says little about what specific structure ends up being formed.