It's the opposite of a theoretical application, and it's not a hype piece. It's more like an experimental confirmation of a theoretical result mixed with an engineering progress report.

They show that a certain milestone was achieved (error rate below the threshold), show experimentally that this milestone implies what theorists predicted, talk about how this milestone was achieved, and characterize the sources of error that could hinder further scaling.

They certainly tested how it scales up to the scale that they can build. A major part of the paper is how it scales.

>> "Our results present device performance that, if scaled, could realize the operational requirements of large scale fault-tolerant quantum algorithms."

> Google forgot to test if it scales I guess?

Remember that quantum computers are still being built. The paper is the equivalent of

> We tested the scaling by comparing how our algorithm runs on a chromebook, a server rack, and google's largest supercomputing cluster and found it scales well.

The sentence you tried to interpret was, continuing this analogy, the equivalent of

>Google's largest supercomputing cluster is not large enough for us, we are currently building an even bigger supercomputing cluster, and when we finish, our algorithm should (to the best of our knowledge) continue along this good scaling law.