They said up front in the rules that they didn't want Failing With Style approaches to win, so why didn't they explicitly test for that?
There has been no significant jump in capabilities such that a meaningful demonstration of general purpose or cryptographically-relevant quantum computing could be performed on "public hardware".
Presumably the organizers know this but still have incentives to drum up news about QC. So they ignore that problem and focus on how to obscure the fact this is a dog-and-pony show.
Paying 1 BTC for the privilege of getting dunked on in tech media seems like a bad trade.