Lord, let us pray that is not true, as ITER is notorious for pushing their time tables back. Right now they are pushing 2027.
Is that proven or just hopeful?
Hopeful in the sense that the pudding hasn't been eaten and in that it may take only one of these material scientists to be wrong or too optimistic to turn a 'can' into a 'cannot' (In many cases, we have never built parts at the necessary scale and tolerances, so scientists assessing whether we can build them have to extrapolate, too)
And of course, it helps for many of the scientists involved to be on the optimistic side. That possibly is a good thing, as we will never know whether we can build this if we do not try doing it.
Finally, there always is a chance that we overlook some important problem, or (less likely) that new science rears its head.
Why is it legal for government projects to lie so brazenly? Or, at the very least, make these kinds of promises.
To sum it up :
> ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy. You'll never get any funds (nor a high moral among the workers teams) if you frame your research project as "yet another (probably doomed) attempt at nuclear fusion energy".