I will let Scott Aaronson speak. (See https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9668)

> Sometimes these days, I'll survey the spectacular recent progress in fault-tolerance, 2-qubit gate fidelities, programmable hundred-qubit systems, etc., only to be answered with a sneer: "What's the biggest number that Shor's algorithm has factored? Still 15 after all these years? Haha, apparently the emperor has no clothes!" I've commented that this is sort of like dismissing the Manhattan Project as hopelessly stalled in 1944, on the ground that so far it hasn't produced even a tiny nuclear explosion... If there's a reason why you think it can't work beyond a certain scale, say so. But don't fixate on one external benchmark and ignore everything happening under the hood, if the experts are telling you that under the hood is where all the action now is, and your preferred benchmark is only relevant later.

The abacus thing is pretty funny, but it's dangerously uninformed. https://bas.westerbaan.name/notes/2026/04/02/factoring.html

I said this about LLMs a few years ago, and now here we are.