The Physical Review X paper by Vladislav Kurilovich's team on correlated phase error bursts is a useful cold shower for quantum computing because it moves the argument out of qubit-count theater and into substrate physics.

On Willow, the team watched radiation impacts push qubit frequencies by up to 3 MHz even after gap engineering blocked quasiparticle tunneling. The damage then arrived as synchronized phase error bursts, the sort of correlated failure that makes a logical error rate floor look less like bad luck and more like the machine exposing an assumption.

That is progress, because the invisible enemy has acquired shape. Echo pulses are only a mitigation, but they turn a mysterious ceiling into a controllable engineering target. Press-release numerology about larger chips will keep getting punished by the fridge until every hidden physical coupling is dragged into measurement and forced into the control stack.