Follow the money. If someone could find a way to make a viable commercial fusion plant in the short term, it would kill off long-term research almost instantly. That hasn't happened.
ITER research consumed so much funding with little short term gain, even from a pure research angle that it forced anything non-tokomac related into finding private investors, for the most part. Examples against are NIF which regardless of some interesting results, is and always did have a weapons testing testing raison d'etre. JET was repurposed to support ITER and other large projects like the Z-machine I haven't heard much about in years.
The polywell tests funded by Bussard proved at least part of the concept but then .. nothing.
What we're left with are a few very well funded commercial projects all of which are getting pretty closer than the tiresome "10 years and always will be ha ha" thing.
TAE, Genera Fusion, Helion, Commonwealth, and a maybe one or two others (there;s no clue where LockMart is on this anymore or even how serious they really were) are all either fully funded or have significant funding.
In the west, again not counting NIF as its role in weapons testing can't be divorced from it, the large scale fusion experiments are so tied to long standing government programs that unfunding them would be almost unthinkable. AT some point soon JET might be shut down perhaps, and if it has no military use, likewise for Z-Machine. But even if one of the commercial ventures started keeping their own lights lit in the next few years by an internal reactor I don't think it would have any effect on long term ITER or Wendlestein funding.
The general public, in that it cares at all, has been spooned and drip fed and force enema'd that fusion is unworkable for so long that they regard the large research projects as worthwhile, like a particle accelerator : not immanently useful but nothing to try to get cancelled, but of little practical value. The researchers involved in ITER know that groups like LPP, CHina's EAST, and Helion have reached temperature thresholds and containment records that, again, many thought would not be crossed until ITER was ready. What do they care? It's good research, benefits them as well, and regardless of what happens, their careers and retirements are already set.
If I sound anti-ITER, I am. I think multiple countries going all-in on a Big Science approach to fusion that was planned to take decades was a terrible mistake. It didn't matter if it failed or had success. Expectations were already suitably dialed down and pushed into childrens' lifetimes. Governments could toss money into that furnace to look like something was being done, without having to over-commit on a project no one was entirely sold on. I suspect ITER will work. The most recent results from JET indicate so. I don't think it will lead to a single worthwhile practical power-plant design. The world is already moving on.
