in terms of progress quantum winter most likely already happened during COVID and there will no longer be any pause in progress.

between 2021-2024 technical progress was not impressive, and companies failed to build what they were trying to at the pace they wanted to. Since the end of 2024 this is no longer the case and progress is constant. To me it seems increasingly likely that by 2030 we'll have fault tolerant compute across multiple modalities including IBM's superconductors.

“Winter” in this case refers to drying up of investor interest and confidence, due to promises and expectations not being lived up to. The classic example is “AI winter”, of which there were two major ones. The result of that is lack of funding and a dramatic reduction in research.