>Commercial breweries are a reasonable comparison

You might enjoy the Humbird report: https://engrxiv.org/795su

Muscle cells can't tolerate shear forces yeast can, are much more easily poisoned by their own wastes, have a doubling time 12+ times slower, require sterile pharmaceutical-grade amino acids as a feed stock (which themselves cost $100+/kg), etc etc.

Humbird says commercial cell culture bioreactors don't get any bigger than 25 m^3, and have to be run in a clean room. Doesn't sound much like any brewery I've seen.

With plenty of investment you might get 2x better on any one of those metrics, but in order to compete with cows you have to be 100-1000x better on every single one.

They frequently refer to the bioreactors as fermenters because they are mechanically quite similar which was my point. Also that 25m3 is in comparison to 200-1000m3 vessels used commercially. They also note sufficiently sterilizing a 200m3 vessel is viable, but due to various assumptions about cells used reach 25m3. However their analysis is frequently referring to mammalian cells while chicken is a commonly consumed meat source.

They address one of your criticisms right at the beginning: “The replacement of amino acid media with plant protein hydrolysates is discussed and requires further study.”

It’s a solid analysis in the short term, but optimizing cell lines can significantly change some of these numbers.