There’s a parallel with self driving cars. We could make them go around a track autonomously in 2007, and so a lot of people were thinking “how much harder could it be to get this driving anywhere? We will have these everywhere in 5 years!”
15 years later and we are perpetually “5 years out”. Yes you can take a taxi ride in a closed circuit, but that’s much closer to where we were in 2007 than where we thought we’d be today, and it took 15 years to get here.