No squinting required.
There has been also very little if any actual research in other fields powered with quantum computing.
We can keep moving the goal posts and claim that we have made it, but the fact is that QC keeps overpromising and under delivering.
Well, great; that's an opinion. The thing is, if a device uses the quantum-mechanical properties of the universe to do calculation, then it is a quantum computer; asserting that it isn't one is a matter of semantics and categorization, since what you're really doing is redefining the term "quantum computer" to inherently include "gate model" as part of it, which is not a foregone conclusion yet.
I believe, from what I've read, that at this point current and projected gate-model quantum computers will not be competitive on optimization problems where quantum annealing will be, so there is definitely utility in continuing to pursue this research and development exercise.
> There has been also very little if any actual research in other fields powered with quantum computing.
Here's our latest:
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2021/07/14/scie...
As a physics playground, annealers are very compelling, and materials research will definitely benefit from these devices.
Except this definition includes classical computers as well. At the scales of current transistors, quantum effects are required to explain their inner workings, and they are used to perform computations.