Sure, but it’s not about something being useful, is about actually having done it. Like going to the fucking moon or Mars. It’s stupid, and there are a shitton of priorities, but it feels good to have collectively done it

The reality is that the breakeven point isn’t the end goal, and it never was, but the fusion ignition point only achieved this year is a significant place along the development path of something that has great potential to be many dozens if not hundreds of times more effective and efficient than a breeder reactor or a renewable energy farm. I think your mistake is thinking that the current realistically early phase research is the end point, rather than a stepping stone moving forwards. While yes, fusion research started in the 50s, most of it was very iterative and fringe, so there weren’t a lot of significant breakthroughs until really the last 20 or so years, with most mainstream funding and research only coming online in the 2010s.

This is still the early days of research actually being viable, so it would be unwise to say that there is no point. Science often takes decades to pay off. You’re essentially looking at the equivalent of 1952’s solar panels after 75 years of photovoltaic research and saying “What’s the point!? They’re so expensive and inefficient and they probably don’t even break even with the energy required to build them, we can get so much more renewable energy from natural biomass or even biofuels than with these photovoltaics, we should be focusing on wood gasifiers which produce so much more energy!”

These things take time, but hopefully they’ll be worth the wait.

Considering the carbon produced in extraction of resources to build and power the vehicles, along with building and maintaining all the supporting infrastructure, though, it might actually be quite a bit.