Anything which is not adaptive and which is detrimental to our life support system/environment, cannot be considered progress; damage to either the subject or the world as object threatens all.

Progress means forward movement toward a destination. I would like to add toward an innately good destination.
Cancer can progress. But cancer progressing is not what we would term "progress" in the valuable sense.

This leads to the question what is the good?
Until we know what the good is, it is pretty ambiguous what is meant by "progress".

Maybe by good we mean general well being.

Has the well being of humanity, all factors considered, improved significantly?

That's probably hard to measure scientifically. Science tends to hyper focus on individual factors at the exclusion of other factors, giving one sided pictures.

I would compare comparing life for the average person 500 years in the past vs now as like comparing a poor person to rich person. Both sides have unique challenges.
Consider Rome in it's earlier days vs when it fell. Was the progression of Rome toward it's downfall?

Maybe progress is like fruit. Fruit matures to it's peak and then progresses toward decay.

There might not be such a thing as endless progress. And even if you achieve full potential, after that comes the fall.

I tend to think the laws of nature keep life in balance to where it never really fundamentally changes toward greater or lesser good.
It seems a human vanity and fantasy that we can somehow organize our collective nature in such a way to tip the scales toward permanent imbalance towards the good.

Progress is that which is life sustaining and life-enhancing in its broadest sense.