If every physical qubit needs its own control lines, a machine whose logical qubits are each spread across dozens of physical qubits becomes unwirable long before it becomes useful. The way out is the observation that the physical qubits of one encoded block are nearly always meant to receive the same instruction, so the instruction can be broadcast to the whole block at once - which is also exactly what makes the resulting gate fault-tolerant, since an operation applied to each qubit independently cannot spread an error within the block. Designing the machine, the code and the algorithm around that one fact is what turns error correction from an overhead into an architecture.
Dolev Bluvstein, Simon J. Evered, Alexandra A. Geim, Sophie H. Li, Hengyun Zhou, Tom Manovitz, Sepehr Ebadi, Madelyn Cain, Marcin Kalinowski, Dominik Hangleiter, J. Pablo Bonilla Ataides, Nishad Mask…