Yes, and it's not certain that we will ever be able to have a stable, viable fusion plant. There are even somewhat recent works showing that certain kinds of confinement which were being tried in the early days are not theoretically viable.
We're still a few orders of magnitude away from energy, and we're probably quite a few reactor design innovations and material breakthroughs away, I'd say, as far as my layman knowledge goes.
That may well be true. But it also may well be true that absolutely none of the methods currently conceived are at all viable.
If we are spending money fast because we think we're in a sprint to achieving viable fusion power, but it turns out we're actually in a marathon, then it's quite possible we're wasting vast amounts of money unnecessarily. That's not an argument to stop funding fusion research, but it is an argument to moderate it and possibly even broaden the types of research being done to more projects but at overall lower funding rates.
We're still a few orders of magnitude away from energy, and we're probably quite a few reactor design innovations and material breakthroughs away, I'd say, as far as my layman knowledge goes.