Scientists Are Now 43 Seconds Closer to Producing Limitless Energy

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 energyconfinement time from The Future of Fusion Energy:

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.