I was once a big fusion fan also. That was until it became apparent we can't trust humans in all-powerful centralised positions. Machines maybe yes, provided they are not designed to make profit, but humans, definitely not. To me, we were obviously designed to make profit; that is designed to be selfish and greedy. Maybe that was a necessity in our early history, to ensure our earliest survival competing with animals. But now we can see with bigger population it is a problem which has to be managed by decentralisation. There are some religions which recognise this, the ancient african religion of Yoruba has folkloric tales of how decentralisation was used by their spirits, themeselves imperfect like humans, to manage their own greed.
Also they had very special regard for the sun, understanding it to be the source of all energy.
All we are trying to do with fusion, is copy the sun so that a few of us can have ultimate power over all others, whilst all along, the endless energy of the sun is being pushed to us for free.
The only problem, for folks who see it as a problem, is that it is distributed, decentralised.
It is way more than adequate to power humanity, if we put it to use, by having solar receiving hardware in every space around our dwellings and workplaces, and now we can even see how to convert it directly to hydrogen fuel which functionally replaces fossil fuels and more, it is fully reversible with no pollution, and by hydrogen activated biological processes we can even create food, again all powered by sunlight (See "Solein")
I believe this is the path we should be on, it is truly sustainable, in fact we would even scale up growth in the same way as trees scale up, after they turn from consuming only the energy of tha Earth as a shoot without leaves, to a tree with leaves absorbing the energy of the sun.
As far as I see things, we are almost there, humanity has sprouted its first leaves in the form of solar farms all over Earth.
Now all we need is something that performs the same function as nutrients in trees, to transport the energy received effectively to all humans.
We might notice that could be money.
By Austrian Economics which says all money should be balanced with product, now that the product is there, donated to us, and scaling up, money has to come to authentically reflect it, by being given out for free to all people otherwise it is increasingly no longer reflecting actual product, so it devalues in markets since the money is not the thing of value, it is the product. So we see inflation.
What we should be reading from all of this is what nature is trying to communicate to us, with bumps and nudges like climate change events, viruses, wars, and these more subtle things that we can work out mathematically, that even the rotation of the Earth and its trajectory around the sun are all dependent on us doing the right thing, using the energy of the sun.
For me now its a no brainer, fusion isn't the right path, the path we really must follow, before any success in fusion, is full utilisation of the energy of the sun.
If we accept nature is the grand authority, as I believe we must, then we might see she does have a currency, it is energy. The only issuer and enforcer of it is the sun. It has already started burning our asses for not using it, but could potentially literally throw us out, if we really insult it, by something like geoengineering, which I am sure would be done very soon after the sun was somehow replicated as fusion. If that ever happened, at least before full utilisation of the sun, those in power would absolutely sabotage all chances of anyone using the energy of the sun after fusion, and very soon after that we would become a rogue dark planet, no longer orbiting the sun, thrown out by increased solar pressure, breaking orbital equilibrium.

Way I see it, it is the sun we have to use first. After that, we would have massive funds even for fusion, which might still be useful for spacecraft, but it should never become the sole power source of humanity.