Funny, this is the complete opposite of my experience. Greenfield projects I've been a part of have had a ton of highly visible progress with _frequent_ updates to stakeholders basically from day 1. Same goes for complex additional features.
Of course you can call out the former examples as incompetent or hubris, and they will probably occur less and less, but nevertheless they exist.
I think the OP meant projects that required long investments without immediate returns. For instance, a platform migration that requires many components to be finished before it can even be tested. Or, real greenfield, like a new product venture with a unproven customer thesis. The kind that requires months of work before you can go to market and validade... How do you report progress? Components built, percentage completed? Without something a user can drive or a seller sell, that's not progress... It's just speculation.