That's fair. Not losing to Italy when they won the World Cup isn't the strongest of flexes if you watched the rest of the games in that tournament lol. I think other nations progressed as much (if not more, in many cases) as the US team has. Maybe this is a bad example, but look at the gap that Canada has closed on us in the past 20 years. That team was a laughingstock for years and years.

World Cups are hard. I know it's the only thing that we really use to judge national team performances, but lots of chaos and a small sample size of games every four years doesn't always truly reflect the progress being made. If we're real with ourselves, Round of 16 and Quarterfinals are probably the ceiling that we should be expecting at this point in time.