This can be true, and the part quoted by the OP ("Flash forward to today, and the race is on to build fault-tolerant quantum computers and discover new algorith

This can be true, and the part quoted by the OP ("Flash forward to today, and the race is on to build fault-tolerant quantum computers and discover new algorithms to apply them in useful ways.") can also be true. The reason we don't have "a quantum computer that can solve a problem that anybody cares about" is because of that lack of fault tolerance, not because we don't have some experimental quantum computers that work in laboratory tests.