thanks Barry.
It isn't all pop science - generally the only indication on where company and secured government labs have progressed to with sensitive technology are PR releases or advertising pamphlets that only provide glimpses of the very real underlying science.
The article you linked presented an interesting perspective, but it did not in any way refute QM, Bell's theorem, superposition, entanglement etc. - the author certainly did not suggest that quantum computing will fail because it is based on false ideas in QM (in your words "with Santa and the Goblins").
He did point out that precision quantum computing is difficult - that makes sense, since it is based on very fragile and well hidden phenomena. I guess that the potential payoff could be so significant that a variety of labs are putting in the hard yards on the difficult stuff, now that the extravagant promises are becoming less outrageous and the relatively low hanging fruit has been exploited (ie, quantum computing is following the standard hype profile).
Cheers Ray
edit: this is a quite interesting lecture (if a bit old)
https://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html
also: Google has announced that their 53 qbit quantum computer has completed a demonstration computing activity in 600 seconds total compute time that could only be simulated by using at least 2.5 days of access to the full resources of the largest conventional supercomputer on earth (2x10^20FLOPS and 250petabytes of disk). The 600 second quantum processing time was required for 3X10^6 runs of the algorithm, results from which were stacked to reduce the random noise to low levels. The "fidelity" of the processing was on the order of a couple of percent, which I guess would be adequate for many otherwise intractable problems. As the researchers note :"We have performed random quantum circuit sampling in polynomial time using a physically realizable quantum processor (with sufficiently low error rates), yet no efficient method is known to exist for classical computing machinery. As a result of these developments, quantum computing is transitioning from a research topic to a technology that unlocks new computational capabilities. We are only one creative algorithm away from valuable near-term applications."
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1666-5