Some people will need to become more discreet, while some people need to take more space, some people need to be less materialistic, while others need to accept to use material for their own comfort, some people need to play more, some need to work more.
Also, what you see is rarely the definitive result: it's usually only part of the ungoing correction, meaning you may be seeing a swing on the other side of the curve, a different kind of unbalance, and it would be easy to judge the meditant is not progressing.
However, progress in meditation is not an absolute, it is always to be understood in the context of each human. Some start from very far away on their path, and what your perceive as failure may be a great success for them.
As usual with things that are practiced inside yourself, there is no objective way of measuring progress. We don't have a wisdom metter. This is also why it's very hard to assess if somebody is practicing correctly, or if some teaching is off. Teachers have tools for this, but even that is fuzzy at best.
My personnal experience is that I used to be minimalist, and after years of meditation, now I buy more things. I used to attend to more social events, and now I'm declining regularly some of them. Now some around me could see that as a regression. But from my perspective, it's a way of taking more care of myself.
Be careful with the way you evaluate people, practicing or not. You are probably not having all the context.