I partially agree but if you play a game for a long time, say you go to 500 or 600 hours of play with the same characters - and I've been in that neighborhood a couple of time - then even if you don't have a lot of character progression it starts to feel weird if the system is blocking characters from progressing.
Take "Traveller". It's got this brilliant character burner system. The character burner system implies that it takes years to gain small marginal improvements in your skill. Ok, fine. I believe that, though, at the level of comparing what real world people can do to what other real-world people can do, it feels like the range of skill offered by the character burner is smaller than the range of skill we commonly observe. But, again, that's fine, maybe you aren't supposed to play an extraordinarily talented character. But now we start playing and we play through many adventures and the characters do a lot of stuff. Why can't they progress like in the character burner at least? The character burner suggests that by having the sort of experiences that the player characters are having is how they got their skills in the first place - and not just in the narrow ways that Traveller normally allows it. I mean presumably we're doing more stuff and more interesting stuff now than during the character burner stage of that person's life, because otherwise why aren't we playing through those parts of life on the mere principle that you should always start the story where it is most interesting?
What aesthetic is really being served by not having character progression? It almost becomes a defiant attitude - "Oh yeah, this is thing that sets our game apart from those other games. We don't need character progression." that doesn't make a lot of sense to me from either in the imagined world or in terms of the story being created or the meta of playing a game. So yeah, you don't need rapid increases in power for the aesthetic Traveller is going for in its base game, but it does feel like a weird oversight that you can't get a marginal improvement every in-game year or so at least - like a special extra character burner step but with less aging going on.