Silicon is not valuable because it is a good conductor, in fact it is actually more like an insulator in its natural state. However, mixing the right materials into it, it becomes a very good semiconductor. So it can let current flow easily or block it effectively, making it a good basis for transistors. The problem here are the normal (usually copper) wires between transistors that cause heat to build up whenever current flows through them. That limits how densely you can pack wires in a chip. With a superconductor, we could not just have much smaller and much faster processors, we could also have many designs that don't require cooling anymore. Imagine a power monster chip like the RTX 4090 running state of the art LLMs locally on your phone. That's the kind of stuff that's at stake here and that's also why everyone and their uncle wants to be author on the original paper.