Look if a scientist at LLNL is excited about it, then there's a conflict of interest here. The fact of the matter is that there is such a high likelihood that inertial confinement is a dead end, because as far as I can tell there is not a realistic plan to harvest the produced energy, which at least, some of the other designs do. The bar is literally higher in other branches of fusion research (and they too are getting called to task for reporting plasma q values instead of estimated plausible total yields). Until someone starts at least building a model of how to collect this energy high levels of skepticism are warranted.
Agree with the first sentence. I worked at a couple of national labs and the number one priority is to keep the lab open by justifying the flagship project. NIF has a long history of disappointments so it's nice to see some success, but it still isn't clear building this thing was justified. The main rationale during the planning stages was "stockpile stewardship" which loosely translate into "making jobs for nuclear weapons scientists even though we aren't building any."
