It sounds to me like The Mill is an effort being driven by people who are unwilling to get their hands dirty in anything they don't personally know and enjoy doing, which is never a good sign for a startup, IMHO. OTOH if they can convince the money to spend big on an organization prior to having a product, well, good for them! On general principal I'm in favor of transferring wealth from financiers to tech people.
And I've seen a few times in the industry where marketing claims are taken at face value by later engineers who then actually live up to said claims thinking "well they did it, there has to be a way". The positive outlook by being sure that there is a way rather than just having a nagging suspension that it isn't possible is huge. Even if the Mill is vaporware at the end of the day, they're probably more valuable to the industry as a pining for what could have been (taken at face value) rather than an example of what not to do like most vaporware.
So staying positive is probably best for us all.
It's not 2004 anymore, they should be able to make progress to making a chip at the gate counts they've been pitching with very little capital investment because of how much democratization of chip tech has happened over the past few years.
Plus I was under the impression that VCs want to at least see something running in an FPGA for a chip startup. The space is filled with software engineers that have trouble synthesizing their HDL. Cut out the fancy meta chip generator, sit down and write some HDL enough for a 'bronze' core and then I imagine the money will start flowing for the money for a leading edge node where the arch will really shine.