> That level of noise performance is still wildly out of reach

It's only ~1 order of magnitude away from current capability. current gen QCs are around 1% gate error rate, and a decade ago SOTA was ~10% error rate, so if progress continues it should be achievable relatively soon.

People don't understand the exponential function.

Let's say you start adding water to a fish tank drop by drop, and double the number of drops each time. One drop, two, four, eight, and so on. When is the fish tank half full? When it's like 1/16 of the way full, or something like that.