Yes this is true. Note BSD supports this better with Ctrl-T to generate SIGINFO, which one can send to any command even if not supported, in which case it's ignored. Using kill on linux, and having that kill processes by default is decidedly more awkward.

It's also worth noting the separate "progress" project which can be used to give the progress of running file based utilities.

We generally have pushed back on adding progress to each of the coreutils for these reasons, but the low overhead of implementation and high overlap with existing options was deemed enough to warrant adding this to dd