I don't think it's a dick move an don't think it's mission accomplished. We'd say that if they were still around or were the predominant ancestor.

We don't really talk like this about other animals or evolutionary sociology.

If we killed all the wolves to stop our sheep from getting killed we would not say "oh it's not that bad, they're still around, look at that chihuahua" even tho those are to my knowledge closer to eachother genetically. The loss of the dodos is not made up for by chickens to pick something further appart. Similarly we don't say certain cultures are still around because some difficult to define small part of them passed on.