"early days" means that the 1998 computer didn't have qubits that were below the error correction threshold. Now we have hundreds of qubits below threshold. We'll need millions of qubits like these for quantum computing to be useful. If that take decades, this is the "early days" relatively.
It's not only early days in hardware, it's early days in practical applications as well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09124