Well I'm going to ignore the snark and actually answer. My situation is perhaps a little unique in that my parents bought into a co-op in the late '40s/early '50s, a good while before I was born. After decades I moved back and it's now my place (but no longer a co-op as I own it). The co-op corporation originally bought my whole block and put up the seven buildings that are now here, and my parents were among the first to move in. So in a sense I didn't displace anyone in my apartment but in a different sense there were brownstones/walkups existing on the land. I'm guessing that the 365 apartments in my complex were about the same number as what they replaced but that's just a guess as it was a little before my time, although I have seen a few photographs.
So the question of "was it progress" is of course an open one but at this point it's a bit moot as it's been at least 70 years since the previous buildings were demolished, if not more.
But none of this has anything to do with how I feel about all of it. There's been a lot of new construction in my neighborhood as the hotness level is rising quite rapidly, to the point of where I'm a little concerned about the "carrying capacity" of the area. To me this means "how many supermarkets are there?" There's been a lot of new buildings and for a while the population was increasing but the supermarket count was at best unchanging, if that. That was a huge problem when southern Long Island City was first starting to get developed as all these luxury buildings were going up but they weren't putting in any supermarkets/restaurants/delis/schools/drugstores/etc. It was a problem, and I've always had a funny feeling that without Fresh Direct being headquartered in the neighborhood all those new luxury residents might've starved to death. Over the years that's evened out so there seems to be a proper organic balance between population and available resources nowadays. In my neighborhood, basically on the Astoria/Long Island City border, a similar thing's happened but it's still a potential issue.
So my main thesis here is that "unplanned, organic" growth/change over decades tends to let things take care of themselves. Folks see living opportunities, other folks see business opportunities to serve those residents, the city builds schools, subways, bus routes, etc. to also serve those residents. The problem with Amazon is they care about none of this. That's not bad in and of itself, but their proposal was to dump 50,000 upper middle class people in the area five days a week. Where will they live? What will they eat? Where will they shop? How will they get in and out of the neighborhood when the work day ends? The right-leaning folks may say something like "well, that's how business is done" and the left-leaning folks may say "no, this is inherently unfair to those who are already there and to those who will have to provide (and pay for) resources to fill these new needs." And that's where we are. It's not that the right people or the left people are right/wrong, it's that it's a giant social/societal problem that has no simple one sentence answer.
So to me the question is "what type of city do we want to live in," except that's not really the question that most folks are asking. And honestly, it's the same with our stadium. Not a simple question, lots of implications all with multiple answers, none of which are necessarily right or wrong.