The NISQ Trap: Eight Years of Demonstrations the Hardware Was Built to Lose

With a single contested exception, every NISQ-era flagship demonstration of "quantum advantage" has been classically reproduced, or closed by a simulability theorem, within eighteen months of its announcement. Six theoretical results from 2024 through April 2026 explain the pattern: the regions of circuit-space NISQ hardware can run with sufficient fidelity coincide with the regions classical algorithms compress efficiently, because the features that admit one (low effective depth, strong algebraic structure, geometric locality) are the features that admit the other. This reading dates the NISQ programme from its 2018 articulation as an interim retreat from the unmet conditions of the 1996 threshold theorems, characterises the eight years that followed as a closed loop in which the demonstrations the hardware could run were drawn from the only regions classical methods could already attack, and locates the exit from the loop where the threshold theorems originally located it: in fault tolerance. The empirical pattern could in principle break with a demonstration that escapes the current simulability results. After eight years and more than thirty advantage-class announcements, the burden of producing such a demonstration falls to the defenders of NISQ.