I am nowhere near an expert but from what i know:

Having many qubits is of course vital to most quantum algorithms, but there's a good reason you can't simply run a quantum algorithm a qubit at a time until you've ran them all: you need all the qubits in the processor to be entangled to each other, so that the wave function collapses across all of them.

Here IBM has achieved this reliably across 2 qubits and with record processing speed. I don't think they were the first to achieve it at all, but this is a new record in terms of the important metrics beyond number of qubits.