First, let me specify what I mean by progression. While player can progress through story or levels, here I will talk only about progression in a sense of permanent bonuses (upgrades) and more options (sidegrades) for the player. Meta-progression is when that happens outside the game. For example, in a shooter, you may play through a 5v5 match. Once that match ends, you get bonus to your damage or unlock a new weapon or skin, which stays with you for all future matches.
I already touched on this a bit in On microtransactions, where I conclude that the only acceptable microtransactions are for cosmetics in free to play online games. But lets say there is no money involved, the game is bought once and that is it. Normally, meta-progression exists to trick player into playing for longer and buy microtransactions, but in this case there is no more money to be made, so it just exists to waste the player's time. Why I say waste? Because you are playing the same matches over and over to grind enough points for the next unlock. The problem is not that it makes the game long, but that it makes the game tedious, because there is nothing new to discover, you play just to unlock the thing you want. But maybe you like the game, so you do not mind, for now...
Most people will eventually get tired of the same game. They might stop playing before they unlock everything they wanted and maybe they still did not unlock some new feature that they would enjoy a lot, so they walk away from the game with a worse experience than they would if they had all the options from the start.
A special note is to be made of the so called rogue-lites. Games with a high degree of randomization, no saves and a meta-progression system. In this case, the meta-progression serves as a difficulty tweak. A good rogue-lite is beatable right from the start, but most people are not capable of that. So they restart as many times as it takes to pile up all the bonuses they need to actually get through the game. While most games start simple and gradually ramp up the difficulty, rogue-lites tend to start hard and get easier with time. A more player time respecting design is to invert this and allow player to take on disadvantages, or use the good old difficulty options.
However, there are people who like their games being tedious. A game does not need to be made to appeal to everyone. But with the large variety of good games we accumulated over the decades, do you really want to spend weeks running the same dungeon?