It's a variation of nerd snipe. https://xkcd.com/356/

People get taken by the theoretical coolness and ultimate utility of the idea, and assume it's just a matter of clever ideas and engineering to make it a reality. At some point, it becomes mandatory to work on it because the win would be so big it would make them famous and win all sorts of prizes and adulation.

QC is far earlier than "linear regression" because linear regression worked right away when it was invented (reinvented multiple times, I think). Instead, with QC we have: an amazing theory based on our current understanding of physics, and the ability to build lab machines that exploit the theory, and some immediate applications were a powerful enough quantum computer built. On the other side, making one that beats a real computer for anything other than toy challenges is a huge engineering challenge, and every time somebody comes up with a QC that does something interesting, it spurs the classical computing folks to improve their results, which can be immediately applied on any number of off-the-shelf systems.