I think a big issue with any discussion of Fusion is that the popsci narrative and the actual research are at a huge disconnect about what the fusion age means. As the article touches upon, fusion is often touted as the future of global energy production which is somehow immune to all engineering and economic realities beyond the physics of achieving fusion reactions, and it will give us limitless free energy in perpetuity. This narrative being obviously false, there are plenty who throw the baby out with the bathwater - if it can't produce free unlimited clean energy then what's the point?

The fact is that fusion is not going to be powering your home any time soon. It's a big jump from scientific breakeven to engineering breakeven, a larger jump to commercial breakeven, and a still larger jump to "too cheap to meter." Realistically, scientific breakeven may happen in this decade, engineering breakeven won't be till the second half of this century, commercial breakeven might not be possible with DT fusion and free fusion power is just a pipe dream. Certainly on the timescales most of us care about we're not going to see fusion power plants in every city replacing all other options.

But no technology needs to be the one true power source. It's fine if fusion just occupies a niche. And that niche may not even be within the realm of electricity production. The major advantage of nuclear power and especially fusion is the extreme energy density of its fuel. This is irrelevant for a commercial power plant, but of great importance where weight is an issue. There are lots of cases like spacecraft, ships, remote locations, etc where the advantages of a nuclear reactor would outweigh the increased cost if you just didn't need to worry about something going wrong with a lot of uranium, which is exactly what fusion offers. Beyond even power production, fusion's main engineering concern can actually be turned into a useful product as an extremely intense neutron source (indeed fusion neutron sources are already a commercially available product, though they currently use much less efficient fusion methods). Process heat, isotope production, hybrid fission-fusion reactors, x-ray sources, there are many ways for fusion to prove useful before commercial or even engineering breakeven.

But even this is missing the point. The fact is fusion is something we know we are unable to do. Like an undeciphered ancient language or an unclimbed mountain, there may be nothing of practical utility at the end of the journey, but what kind of society would we be if we didn't try to tackle the problem? By setting our sights on fusion we have committed ourselves to building better super conducting magnets, better vacuum chambers, better lasers, better micromanufacturing methods, better alloys, better simulations, and many more. We are viewing a realm of physical reality that previously has only ever been observed in nuclear tests, and even then only from a distance. Where we are at right now is still very much in the science experiment realm. It's difficult to put a dollar value on the benefits of scientific research, but for things of similar expense to fusion experiments like large telescopes, particle accelerators, mars rovers, etc we don't typically have to. No one expects any return on their investment in the James Webb Space Telescope, no one expects it to solve any worldwide problems, we're not waiting for the telescope age to be upon us, its only mission is to satisfy our curiosity. Once you realize that the goal of these experiments is to learn, then the fact that every time we build a new fusion reactor we find some new quirk of plasma physics that pushes economic power production further out of reach stops being a failure and becomes a ringing endorsement for further research.