To be honest, even though I have to side with the Germans "Ooh shiny" syndrome, I can't see this view being prevalent when the WAllies start using nukes against Germany, they MIGHT(stretching it right there) go forth with what's practical. Something of a chance, but low. Even though this is CalBear's timeline and he's done, maybe Speer the technocrat might have greater involvement in the right projects?
Also, even though Telakasi is new, he does post sources from texts. If he had done just wiki, I would be dismissive, but he has provided 3 books as sources for his argument so he seems to have good ground in his argument. So to be honest, provide a source against him, if he isn't right, instead of throwing insults at him claiming he's wrong.
The Reich WOULD have developed nukes if they had had the time. The first nuclear strike took place less than a year before the effective obliteration of the Reich. There was no way for the Reich to create a weapon and reasonable delivery system in that time. The Reich did reverse engineer things like transistors when the opportunity presented, usually as a result of aircraft losses by the WAllies.
As is almost always the case, both sides struggled to come up with clear counters/duplication of the enemy's breakthroughs. The WAllies had no more success in developing nerve agents in the last year of the war then the Reich had in trying to make a bomb (and nerve gas is child's play compared to a nuclear weapon).
The Reich was not stupid, insane yes, but not stupid. The Nazi leadership made mistakes that are so common throughout history as to be a given. The prepared to refight the last war and bought into their own propaganda. The WAllies did this as well, learning, in the hardest way possible, that the armored warfare assumptions that had trailed them out of the Pacific Phase were, literally, dead wrong. This added at least a year to the war while both the U.S. and UK went into a crash program of turning previously rejected heavy tank designs into full scale production. The U.S. literally stopped all tank production for half a year while retooling to produce the new Sheridan and Chamberlain tanks (both of which BTW, have OTL counterparts that were either rejected or put into very limited production).
The Reich tried to produce new aircraft, especially additional fighter types, to deal with the very different WAllied platforms and the vastly different tactics the WAllied air forces utilized after the full resumption of the war. The Reich was, however, substantially handicapped compared to the WAllies. While they had the resources of Europe and a large part of "Siberia", the U.S. had control of some of the most important resource regions in "Western Alaska', and the Reich had effectively zero access to many of the "rare earths" and other resources (rubber especially) that the Wallies had in virtually unlimited quantities. This greatly limited the Reich's engineers in what the could take from concept to reality (an OTL example of this is the Jumo 004 that powered the Me-262, compared to the RR Nene it was an operational disaster, requiring replacement every 50 hours of run time (often much less, Luftwaffe maintenance records have numerous example of replacement being required after as little as 12 hours of operating time or roughly 4 missions).
As for bomber losses - the British lost 590 Bombers from January-April 1945 so I assume that the Americans lost an equal number - thats roughly 1200 Allied bombers in the first 4 months of 1945. Thats roughly 500 bombers from mid March to early May. Count in a few hundred fighters and total Allied air losses in the last 6-7 weeks of the war were most likely somewhere around 1000-1200 aircraft. Meaning that the R4M destroyed between 1/3 and half of all Allied aircraft. I think this is not an unrealistic number.
