Ever notice that basically all cars have 90% identical feature sets while only a small handful of special features differentiate any particular model from the rest of the market? How did that situation come about? Did God come down from heaven in 1970 with some stone tablets describing an AMC Pacer and declare "Here is the basic idea of the automobile. Now go forth and add superficial features to this design"?
Of course not. What happened was that manufacturers competed for many decades, incrementally adding new features. And when one manufacturer found a feature that succeeded in the market, other manufacturers copied it.
This is how technology advances: by building on past success.
What does not lead to progress is imitation, where the feature in question is copied to be completely identical without any incremental improvements or adjustments for context.
You certainly have a very interesting definition for "progress."