It feels more like the time to develop the tech has outlived the hype cycle around the tech, perhaps moreso than usual. That doesn't mean it isn't going anywhere, just that it's still slow (and in fact, after the hype cycle, the average press release is more likely to be substantive than during it, even if it's still incremental).

(From my reading/understanding of it, for a while there's been little point in trying to make a quantum computer big enough to do such work, because the individual parts would not work well enough for it to have any chance of success, while this result primarily is showing that they're now at the cusp of the predicted tipping point where the qubits have a low enough error rate that building a larger system out of them has a hope of working. That's the big news in google's recent announcement, not them pushing up the numbers in this somewhat contrived benchmark)

No one is claiming number factoring advances. That would require much longer lived qubits entanglement than is currently possible. The tech is clearly advancing forward though.

That feels like a straw man. Nobody was claiming otherwise.