Protein powders are an ultra-processed food.

Some protein powders, e.g. many of the plant protein powders, require complex processing, which is reflected in their price, which is many times greater than the price of meat (per protein content).

However there are other protein powders that are obtained using minimal processing, much less than the traditional food processing, so they cannot be considered "ultra-processed" by any definition.

For instance the protein concentrates that are extracted from milk or whey are much less processed than the traditional dairy products. (This is also reflected in their price, which is similar to that of the cheapest kinds of chicken meat, per their protein content.)

To extract the protein powder from milk or whey, only simple (in principle) processing steps are done: centrifugation to remove the fat, ultrafiltration to remove the lactose and the water and drying to remove the residual water.

This kind of processing alters the proteins of milk far less than the traditional making of cheese, which requires strong processing with enzymes and/or acid and/or heat and/or fermentation, and which causes significant changes in the structure and composition of the milk proteins.

If you call milk/whey protein concentrate as "ultra-processed", you must call any cheese as "hyper-super-ultra-processed".

It is true that making milk/whey protein powders requires machines that can be made only using modern technologies, while cheese and other dairy products were already made many millennia ago. However the simplicity of the old technologies is only apparent, because they exploited the work of dead animal bodies (rennet) or bacteria or fungi, which are much more complex than human-made machines.

In this case, i.e. for making milk/whey protein powders, modern technology has allowed the use of much less processing for extracting the useful part of milk, keeping it in its unaltered state, than the traditional technologies, so this is clearly not an example of "ultra-processing".

Similarly, extracting vegetable oils using supercritical carbon dioxide is certainly not "ultra-processing" as it allows a better preservation of the oil fraction of oily seeds or oily fruits than the traditional oil extraction methods.

So the use of modern processing methods is not the same as "ultra-processing". To the latter, one should count only processing methods that cause irreversible changes in the food, removing the control of the end users on the composition of the food that they eat, i.e. processing that mixes ingredients into the food or that alters the food through heating or other treatments.