Among cryptography engineers there was a sharp vibe shift over the last 2 months; there are papers supporting that vibe shift, but there's also a rumor mill behind it too. The field has basically aligned fully in a way it hadn't before that this is an urgent concern. The simplest way to put it is that everyone's timeline for a real-world CRQC has shortened. Not everyone has the same timeline, but all those timelines are now shorter, and for some important (based on industry and academic position) practitioners, it's down to "imminent".

It's theory. The concern is for avoiding a (likely, IMO) scenario where the only real indication that someone cracked QC is one or more teams of researchers in the field going dark because they got pulled into some tight-lipped NSA project. If we wait until we have an unambiguous path to QC, it might well be too late.

To avoid the scenario where for a prolonged period of time the intelligence community has secret access to QC, researchers against that type of thing are incentivized to shout fire when they see the glimmerings of a possibly productive path of research.

still theory, but there seems to be an emerging consensus that quantum systems capable of real-world attacks are closer to fruition than most people generally assumed.

Filippo Valsorda (maintainer of Golang's crypto packages, among other things) published a summary yesterday [0] targeted at relative laypeople, with the same "we need to target 2029" bottom line.

0: https://words.filippo.io/crqc-timeline/

Nothing has been broken yet, however data can be collected now and be cracked when the time comes, hence why there is a push.

Theory. And afaik there are still questions as to if the PQ algorithms are actually secure.