Yah, exactly! People always make this mistake when studying evolution. There’s no plan and no goal. It’s incremental changes that are sometimes better in some way, but sometimes not, with no heading or direction in mind. Generally a useful property is then adapted to an unexpected use later. So we look back at all the steps that lead to “eyeball” or “flight” and think it was somehow destiny or was always leading that way, but it wasn’t. Each step was better than the last, but not necessarily as part of a journey towards a complex structure. Early parts of the eyeball might have been useful for camouflage, attracting mates, or whatever.
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