That doesn't make sense at all. I think they were just showing that quantum computer advancement isn't going to have the same rapid development that transistor based computers did a few decades ago.
To be clear: I think investing money in making quantum computers that are intended to show better performance than supercomputers for a wide range of high performance computing tasks is unlikely to bear any useful fruit for the foreseeable future.
That doesn't mean I don't want investment into quantum optics, or any number of other quantum-related fields, which have demonstrated far more utility in far less time than quantum computing.
