Here's an interesting article that puts this into perspective and provides a lot of history about nuclear research:
https://quillette.com/2022/02/21/fusion-power-is-coming/
EDIT:
The above article talks about some other approaches, such as:
> MIT physicist Bruno Coppi proposed achieving fusion in a very small tokamak by the simple expedient of using ultra-strong magnetic fields. The magnetic field lines of a tokamak confine particles to follow them, spiraling around the chamber, with the radius of the spirals being inversely proportional to the strength of the magnetic field. Coppi reasoned that the relevant dimension of a tokamak was not its size per se, but the ratio of its size to the radius of the spiral, because it is this ratio that determines how long a particle will last before it hits the wall. Furthermore, as noted above, the higher the magnetic field strength, the faster the particle is likely to react. So if you want a particle to take part in a fusion reaction before it hits the wall (which would cool it too much for fusion), the key is just to go for broke with ultra-powerful magnets. But the problem is that the highest magnetic field it is practical to achieve with traditional low temperature superconducting magnets is about 6 Tesla, and Coppi needed 12 T. So, he designed an experimental machine called “Ignitor” using copper magnets. This could not be a practical commercial reactor, because the resistive copper magnets would use too much power. Nevertheless, if it had been built, we probably would have achieved thermonuclear fusion ignition in the 1990s. But all of the US Department of Energy funds were committed to ITER, so Ignitor was never built. But starting around 2014, an MIT group led by Professor Dennis Whyte decided to pick up where Coppi had left off, improving on the Ignitor concept by making use of high temperature super conductor magnets, which require no electric power and can reach 12 T. As a result, with more than twice the magnetic field strength as ITER, the CFS reactor, known as SPARC (for Smallest Possible Affordable Robust Compact) fusion reactor, will achieve 1/5th the power hoped for by ITER in a reactor 1/65th the volume. Furthermore, CFS aims to do it by 2025, achieving in seven years what ITER hopes to do in half a century.