Also, in the world of QC, right from its very roots, the ability of QC improved in mind boggling large steps every year. It's only that you cannot see it if you only look at the wrong metric, i.e., factorization records.
It's a bit like saying "classical computing technology has not improved for 50 years, it's only recently that we finally start to have programs that are able to write other programs".
That no significant factorization milestones have moved is a huge critical black eye to this field. Even worse, that no one has ever even been able to truly run Schors algorithm on even trivial numbers is a shocking indictment of the whole field.
With QC, the risk (and I am not saying this is going to happen, but I'm saying that it is a non-overlookable risk) is that we end up transitioning from "QC can only factorize 15" to "RSA-2048 is broken" in such a sudden way that the industry has no time to adapt.
Factorisation is one of the few problems that we know are in BQP \ P. You could make the argument that we're not at a stage where running Shor's alg. on integers is feasible hence integers don't capture the progress in the field... but that's perhaps too much honestly for a field that is riding on a bubble.
That's exactly what they are saying, and I'll say it too. Maybe they weren't explicit enough, but reread their comments as "not a relevant figure [to measure current progress].
Imagine if you had crummy, unreliable transistors. You couldn't build any computing machine out of them.
Indeed, in the real world progress looked like:
* Useless devices (1947)
* Very limited devices (hearing aids)
* Hand-selected, lab devices with a few hundred transistors, computing things as stunts (1955)
* The IBM 1401-- practical transitorized computers (1959)-- because devices got reliable enough and ancillary technologies like packaging improved.
In other words, there was a pattern of many years of seemingly negligible progress and then a sudden step once the foundational component reached a critical point. I think that's the point of the person you're talking to about this.
And then just a couple of years later we had the reliability to move to integrated circuits for logic.
If you looked at the "transistorized factorization record" it would be static for several years, before making a couple steps of several orders of magnitude each.
No, electronic based computers were not useless from the start and very very rapidly started making significant progress.
But everyone knew that it wasn't going to move going in. It would have been shocking if it had. It was never a reasonable medium-term goal.