I'm a skeptic as well, but calling it a "scam" is a bit extreme. I think QC proponents are acting in good faith, and I believe that it is worth chasing a little longer since we don't yet have a convincing model for why QC will or won't work (although I think the Gil Kalai's work in this area is intuitively correct I don't think that we have a physical explanation for why quantum error correction would not work).
The current emphasis on NISQ systems is a bit of a desperate measure because the most we can get out of such systems is evidence that quantum computing can work in theory; they do not advance us towards having a workable quantum computer.
The last paper I saw posted on hackernews from Gil Kalai included a few explicit predictions about what would be impossible in quantum error correction.
This was a paper from a few years back.
The problem is that now Google has published results which imply that some Kalai's predictions turned out false.
The paper in question is Google's recent "below threshold"/"beyond break-even" QEC paper. I believe Kalai was predicting below threshold QEC to be impossible IIRC, among other things.
Not sure if Kalai has responded or updated his predictions, I haven't been following him closely.
Although I agree that "scam" is extreme, the commercial side was sullied in the early 2010s by D-Wave selling what they described as "quantum computers" for $10m and spinning up a bunch of misleading PR. Of course you expect a certain deree of "fake it til you make it" in such companies, but they'd been going for over a decade at that point. This was all kicking off as I was doing my PhD in the field. It was eye-opening to see how little attention was paid to serious academics vs hucksters, and how companies like Google could be duped into spending millions on basically nothing.
The current emphasis on NISQ systems is a bit of a desperate measure because the most we can get out of such systems is evidence that quantum computing can work in theory; they do not advance us towards having a workable quantum computer.