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Did some kinds of progress break the ecosystem, though? Galilean cosmology vs. Ptolemaic, iPhone replaced land-lines, electric grid, Gutenberg press, internet vs. paper books, cable TV vs antennas, streaming vs. cable TV...

That's "Let things live side-by-side" on Gordon's list at the end of the article. Not breaking the ecosystem, but growing a new one besides it. In the cases you cite, the new one ultimately became the dominant one, and the prior one withered away.

grumpy gripe: iPhone didn't replace land lines! Ubiquity of Smartphones did - I stopped using a land line without ever having to spend insane amounts on an iPhone :hugging_face:

I think "fork" could be replaced better with "evolve in a breaking way", thus distinguishing splitting evolution from breaking evolution and then breaking ecosystems. I mean, a fork shouldn't actually break anything if you're on the fork, it should be backwards compatible down the tree.

The WWW and most major languages (C, C++, Java) did very well keeping things deprecated for years until they withered, or fell into disuse naturally. And Windows/Unix is another example. OS-X is a counter-example