That's fair enough from a political perspective (after all, as they say in the article, >70% of NIF shots are going to [nuclear] stockpile stewardship now) -- but just to give NIF a bit of credit on the "basic science" front, it has turned out to be quite good for studying the properties of matter under extreme compression more generally.
Some mineral physicists I know have used this to write some cool papers about the properties of natural materials at conditions replicating those expected in the cores of giant exoplanets [1-3], for example.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0437-9