This works because we have a severely demand constrained economy with monstrous amounts of money sloshing around at the top with no idea where to go. The idea is to get a hype train rolling to scoop up some of it. Nothing of value has to be produced.
Certainly, the amount of hype and uninformed investing are damaging to the field, but coherent control of quantum states (whether for computing or not) is a "very big deal", that would create amazing technologies from sensing and metrology to (hopefully) computing.
in what kind of areas?
- coherent superposition of multiple sensors improve the signal to noise ratio
- improving beyond the diffraction limit of telescopes, by quantum-entangling multiple sensors
- using constructs similar to quantum error correcting codes to make measurements more resilient to noise
And these above are just the generic suggestions that are discussed in grad classes. When you dig into it there are so many other amazing quantum tricks to do.
The same type of history had been identified as a way to get things sold.
You can buy the pr for any mediocre technology and it's success is irrelevant.
Nope.
It's going to take decades to mature the technology but it will change a lot. As an investment tool, it's much less certain. Capitalism is fluid. If money is easily available, people will start bad companies to get that money. The internet went through a bubble but certainly did change everything.