A better measure of progress (valid for cryptanalysis, which is, anyway, a very minor aspect of why QC are interesting IMHO) would be: how far are we from fully error-corrected and interconnected qubits? I don't know the answer, or at least I don't want to give estimates here. But I know that in the last 10 or more years, all objective indicators in progress that point to that cliff have been steadily improving: qubit fidelity, error rate, coherence time, interconnections... At this point I don't think it's wise to keep thrashing the field of quantum security as "academic paper churning".

I think the problem is that “objective indicators pointing to the cliff” is pretty handwavy. Could there be a widely agreed-upon function of qubit fidelity, error rate, coherence time, and interconnections that measures, even coarsely, how far we are from the cliff? It seems like the cliff has been ten years away for a very long time, so you might forgive an outsider for believing there has been a lot of motion without progress.