Not sure if that was intended as judgement but you can’t really blame a guy for not jumping into a meat grinder. Honestly I think it’s an interesting story about how he got past the people trying to kill him.
It's forward progress, but nowhere near being useful.
By "more energy out than they put in", they mean passing "theoretical breakeven", generating more energy as heat than they put in as electricity. Not converting that energy back to electricity and making the thing self-powered. Brief periods of theoretical breakeven have been achieved before.
Ahead lies "sustained theoretical breakeven" - the thing can be kept running for a while. So far, other tokomak experiments have achieved 70 seconds of plasma containment (Korea) and 120 seconds (China). That's below ignition temperature, though. Then "self-sustaining breakeven" - the thing can power itself. Then, someday, "economic break-even" - it can pay for itself. Then, maybe, useful power generation.
There's the problem of getting the energy out in some useful form. This begins with the "first wall" problem of finding something that can survive the conditions just outside the magnetic field. Those conditions include huge numbers of neutrons, which tend to split atoms in the first wall material and cause unwanted transmutation. This causes radiation embrittlement, which is not good for materials.
