Are we being asked to lose on purpose in order to complete evolutions mastery?

You have to manually claim the upgraded version at the progression hub (the place where you can check all your evolution players) in order to do further upgrades, so you can basically not claim the final upgrades until you finish the objectives, I'm just curious if the fully upgraded player count towards the progress or not, cause there will be people who either accidentally claimed the upgrades, or who didn't even see the related objectives cause it's close to the bottom of the "milestones" objectives.