I don’t have a good answer to “what does underwater technological progression look like?” I just want to point out that we are under a heavy survivorship bias. Just because we are where we are does not mean there aren’t other plausible histories.
Sure, you can't identify path dependence from 1 data point.
Moving back to the land-sea war, we know how to make bombs and stuff, so they better have something like steel and know how to come attack us on land and so on if there is any notion of it being a contest.
Cooking and metallurgy are both pretty important, and we got them incrementally, starting from fire being pretty easy to do.