I never had seen the scaling 2^(n^2) before. Can you provide a reference for that?

I am also don't understand the point of simulating noise correctly. If you get the result from computation on some vendor black-box black box quantum computer can you really know with what type of noise you would have obtained the result?

Another skepticism about the hype is that the result of quantum computation is just a matrix product on initial state from predefined gates. It is just linear algebra on large unitary matricies. Nothing quantum about it.