Almost certainly, the pop press is missing every possible "but". Just from what I do understand, how impressive this is depends on the temperature and density of that plasma and annoyingly, they actually do mention that, but then don't give the corresponding numbers.

I found a bunch of headlines saying the record for a tokamak is 22 minutes, which was impressive for beating the previous record by 25%. Progress in this tends to be incremental. Here's a nice little graph of energy*confinement time from The Future of Fusion Energy:

Every minute that passes in Africa, scientists are 60 seconds closer to discovering infinite energy!

Limitless free energy that billionaires will gladly charge you $250 a month for

Sounds like fusion power is only 20 years away.

I'm already getting limitless energy from fusion. I just use PV as a mediator.

Cool to see that progress is being made, though we're still several decades and many unsolved problems away from fusion as a viable power source. It does seem silly to focus so much on performing fusion here on Earth when we could just be collecting the energy from the Sun.