Its zeitgeist appeal has been stuck for like 20 years.
The problem with it is that unlike sell-side mortgage fraud, self-driving cars, crypto, and current AI… quantum computing doesn’t have a simple, approachable, mass appeal parlour trick to rally around.
Until it gets one, it’s never going to facilitate the scale of grift and graft as the others.
The threat of breaking all encryption has been a slow-burning $1 trillion or more grift for the field over the last 20-30 years. Not that anything has materialized from it. I am somewhat convinced that PQC is primarily being rolled out so that we can all stop funding those clowns (and because lattice-based cryptography is finally ready for prime time).
If all crypto can only be broken by a machine that can itself only be made by 3 companies all of which are very careful about who they sell to, we get a few governments spying on everyone (including each other), while keeping normal criminal hacking (and insufficiently important governments) locked out.
And it’s unrealistic to expect them to stay perfectly motionless, they will try to adapt to the changing landscape too.