Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's an incremental step on a long road. To be sure, the ultimate goal is to understand how to control the plasma well enough to support indefinitely long pulses. But incremental improvements add up, or rather they compound like interest.
What is the plan to extract energy from these things? Same old heat exchanger > supercritical steam > steam turbine > alternator? Or is there some way of getting electricity out of the plasma directly?
Yes. That also makes it difficult to scale up to energy production - now you need to route a bunch of cooling water plumbing and heat exchangers around it, engineer it to transfer the bulk of the reactor heat output to the cooling water without melting any heat exchangers, then build a turbine/generator rig to attach to it. Might possibly need an extra water loop too, depending on how much neutron flux ends up hitting the water and plumbing when running at a reaction rate sufficient to generate power.