Is Progressive cannon? There are differences in story such as when Kirito and Asuna met, but it does explain Kirito's ability to use hand-to-hand combat in the beginning of the Fairy Dance arc due to the skill transferring to ALO from SAO.

Kawahara explains this at length in the Afterword of the first Progressive novel. He didn’t want to leave Asuna out of the story for much of the beginning of Progressive because it just didn’t feel right to him regardless of the contradiction. He states he’s going to do his best to make the Progressive series line up with previous events. But as we haven’t actually covered any of those events in progressive so far we don’t really know how much it will deviate.

You can basically view Progressive as replacing the first two novels in the timeline. It doesn’t really change any of the events of novels after the Aincrad arc either way. Assuming key events like Sachi’s death remain the same.