It's not competing with fission, though. It's competing with renewables + storage + load shifting + efficiency. Compared to those, it might indeed be "meh".
Until prices do start to bottom out, investment in storage is wasteful, so dollars go to generating capacity of known utility.
Each square meter of panel that goes online delays climate disaster by a precisely understood amount. Each panel made can go into service almost instantly. No matter how big the project, it can start delivering power anytime. There is no smallest-useful facility, right down to the residential rooftop.
Every dollar diverted to Tokamak instead brings climate disaster nearer.
This is not intended as a rant against solar (again, I'm an enthusiastic supporter), but I'd guess a landscape of fusion generators would take fewer square meters of land than the equivalent using solar. And that is nothing to scoff at.
It is incredibly unlikely to offset the carbon related gains of solar, because the carbon sequestration efficiency of plants and trees is very low to begin with, far lower than solar's capacity to displace carbon emitted from coal when area is held constant.
Sure, it's better to put the solar where there is no existing tree cover, but it seems like most of Appalachia is covered in trees.
Solar power will never need to remove more than a tiny fraction of tree cover from Appalachia. What's a far bigger threat to the ecosystem, including animal migration, is mountaintop removal for coal mining:
https://law.lclark.edu/live/blogs/134-de-regulation-of-mount...
Renewables are key to having a sustainable energy economy. Fusion power is what will let us do the drastic things to recover from climate disaster that is already here.
