Harmonic "progression" is really quite simply the contrasting of one modal frame against another. This is why people say that "every melody implies a chord progression", because tonal melodies move through various modal frames in a phrase.
When you are writing counterpoint, and thickening lines with contrary or oblique motion (especially in the bassline), if it is well written, it will inevitably fit within the same modal frames.
It gets more complicated when you have a phrase that, in the span of perhaps just two bars, may involve three independent harmonized voices that use multiple modes constructed from a shared tonic, and scales that contain both major and minor thirds. Trying to analyze the "underlying harmony" of such pieces necessarily involves an abstraction. "Okay, the "harmony" in bar 1 is D....something. D5? Just a pedal tone?" . That's much less helpful (and eventually gets more complicated) than just identifying the modes and scales used by each line.
Thus, composing with the idea of "I will have a bar of D(?), then G, then F#m, then..." quickly becomes useless at worst, or highly restrictive at best.
I can honestly say that composing with the idea of chord progressions at the fore severely impeded my ability to compose "orchestral" sounding orchestral music for years, when I should have been viewing harmony as any and all vertical relationships between lines and internalizing how they all sound. It makes your choices much more deliberate. Now, if I compose a line that moves up stepwise from the tonic, I don't just plunk down the tonic chord because that would be standard practice. Instead, every other note supporting each note of the melody is deliberately chosen to achieve a specific aesthetic. It slows my composition down, but I can't argue with the results — results that have also attracted new clients over the years offering to pay.
I will go so far as to say with this "pop" approach to harmony: Especially where the orchestra is concerned, I don't think it's possible to compose an effective string quartet, let alone symphonic piece. Look no further than Hans Zimmer or the endless slew of YouTube "teachers" who can talk about chords until the cows come home, but ask them to write a piece more like Holst or John Williams and they simply cannot do it, because that music wasn't composed in that way.
It's like how you'll see all these channels doing "reductions" and analysis of JW's scores, and it's almost always a total mess with how they are writing chord names above the staff or even a full sentence trying to describe what is happening harmonically: You simply can't explain most of his orchestral pieces as "chords + melody".
The "chord progression" approach really only works idiomatically for keyboard instruments and pop bands, tbh.