Let's deal with the environmental impact argument first. We can estimate the cost of damage to the environment from what activities societies allow, and the value those activities produce. The largest use is agriculture. Societies allow elimination of natural ecosystems and their replacement by crop monocultures. What value is obtained? Typically, the value of crops delivered from a tract of land is two orders of magnitude less than the value that could be obtained by putting PV there.
So, if we stipulate your environmental argument rules out renewables, it also (to a much stronger degree) rules out agriculture. This is obviously absurd, so your argument cannot succeed.
As for recent "goings on"... I do follow them rather closely. You are likely misled by a common cognitive failing. That is: if we have a set of steps needed to reach some goal, then if one of these N steps is achieved, it's natural to think that we're 1/Nth of the way there. But this is only true if the steps are equally difficult. This cognitive blind spot is exploited in those collectable coupon games you sometimes see at grocery stores or fast food outlets. The # of winners is controlled by the number of a particular rare coupon; all the others are just noise.
For fusion, the immediate steps have been plasma confinement, stronger magnets, and so on. But none of these matter if there's a later showstopper. And for DT fusion, there is. That showstopper is the inability of DT fusion reactors to achieve adequately high volumetric power density. None of the recent DT reactors are promising in that respect, and there's good reason to think this obstacle is generic. Lawrence Lidsky (and Pfirsch and Schmitter in Germany) in the 1980s pointed this out. The implication of poor volumetric power density is that DT fusion will be more expensive than fission -- and fission itself cannot compete with renewables.
(I view current work on DT fusion as "making good progress toward a dead end.")
(If Pfirsch's name is familiar, it's because he, with Schlüter, discovered Pfirsch-Schlüter currents, which are important in stellarators.)
The only effort I see that has any chance is Helion's, which does not use DT, because they can evade this showstopper (by not producing their output as heat, allowing them to potentially save on the cost of the non-nuclear part of the plant.)