You are judging an endeavor by how the media reports on it and not how the actual community's estimate of the progress. You are certainly right that a quantum computer big enough to solve a practical computational problem has not been built [1]. The quantum computing community certainly thought a 20 year timeline to QC was viable in the late 90s and early 2000s. However, after the failures of early experimental efforts, the consensus stance at conferences and such is always that QCs will come when they will come. The challenges are big but the path through them is straightforward - keep improving manufacturing capabilities till we can scale [2].
If you follow the literature, you will realize everyone is busy optimizing their manufacturing capabilities instead of going for short term goals of factoring ever larger numbers. We have to go from a regime where grad students spend months/years carefully crafting a handful of small parts to mini-industrial processes which can be used to manufacture thousands or millions of identical parts. It takes time and effort to do build such setups, but progress has been consistent over the last decade or so, and will only get better in the next decade.
If you follow the literature, you will realize everyone is busy optimizing their manufacturing capabilities instead of going for short term goals of factoring ever larger numbers. We have to go from a regime where grad students spend months/years carefully crafting a handful of small parts to mini-industrial processes which can be used to manufacture thousands or millions of identical parts. It takes time and effort to do build such setups, but progress has been consistent over the last decade or so, and will only get better in the next decade.
[1] You should be aware though that there have been several very solid demonstrations of quantum key distribution, including commercial offerings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_key_distribution
[2] Its like humans on Mars. Everyone knows, in principle its possible, but the challenges are huge and rushing things is simply not a viable option.