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If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
I mean, okay, let's run with this hypothetical.
You do progress. This undermines the basis of civilisation (this being your "if"). Civilisation "ends", by which we mean there's no stable law, the modern economy (including agriculture) disintegrates because you can't have trade without functioning laws against theft, half the population eats the other half, infrastructure disintegrates.
But that's not extinction. Humans still exist, a lot of knowledge will be retained, agriculture will persist in some less-efficient form. You'll get governments, sooner or later, as warlords put together enough force to cow people. I don't think their policies are going to be very progressive, particularly since they'll (correctly, in this hypothetical) blame your progress for the apocalypse and warlords are not known for wanting to be eaten.
Sure, maybe they'll come back to where we are now in a hundred years or so. But this doesn't seem to maximise the average amount of progress over time. Unless you think that very-recent and near-future progress is far more important than that from, oh, 1770 to 1970?
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Progress doesn't exist. There is only degrees of survival and almost everything is a tradeoff.
Things that don't sustain themselves die. In the long run no other phenomenon really matters.
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Not dying. Maintaining the level of success, arete, and prosperity that has already been obtained. These are not only good insofar as we get more of them - they are good in and of themselves, and forgetting and taking for granted the successes of the past is one of the chief flaws of modernist thinking.
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It's certainly perfectly cromulent to judge that as good and even better than the alternative of a civilization that keeps chugging along in a way that improves people's lives compared to not having civilization - and even improving the amount by which this is an improvement - without enjoying the fruits of progress, where progress here refers to the types of societal changes pushed for by people identifying as "progressives," rather than something more generic like "improving over time" or "moving forward." I don't think this is a common sentiment, though; what I see by and large is motivated reasoning that circumvents the issue altogether, by adopting a genuine, good faith belief that progress - again, referring to the specific meaning alluded above, not the general term - not only won't result in civilization ending within a generation, but that progress will help make civilization more robust against ending.
As a progressive, I would say that the odds that I'm mistaken about the goodness of my ideology - and more generally that people who agree with me are mistaken about the goodness of our ideology - is sufficiently high that I have a general preference to hedge my bets by having humanity keep moving forward long after my death. It's possible that we'll create literal heaven on Earth that you and I can enjoy until we die as the last humans to have ever lived, but it's also possible that, when good, intelligent, well-meaning people do their best, in good faith, to implement ideas that I consider to be good, this actually creates a hell on Earth that we all have to suffer through before we die as the last humans to have ever lived. I would prefer to avoid that.
The way I see it, the point of civilization is to organize humans in a way that helps make both surviving and thriving easier or more likely for them. Not uniformly or monotonically, but in some vague general sense. Which some/many people see as a good thing worth sacrificing for, even if no one ever enjoys the fruits of progress, again, by that specific meaning referenced above.
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