I think you're right, and I also wonder: Considering how hard it is for us to engineer a fusion plant that merely "breaks even" in terms of energy made usable to us, will fusion plants ever be competitive with fission plants? Like, I understand that hydrogen is a lot cheaper than plutonium or enriched uranium, but iirc we never had an issue getting fission plants to break even. As far as I'm aware, the technology for exploiting fission was obvious as soon as they realized that radioactive decay could be hot enough to boil water, and at risk of sounding glib, everything else about it is just safety measures. Whereas there is no fusion equivalent of "The Pile"[1] from Fermi et al.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1