If anyone's not already aware of it, the SPARC/ARC reactor work spun out of MIT looks pretty promising on shorter timescales than ITER:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4
When you look at history of ITER failures and the real problems involved in making the whole fusion power production operation economically sustainable, this claim disintegrates. It is a very complex project that is hard to manage, and building and operating fusion power plant is currently much more costly than doing that for a fission power plant. The only benefit of fusion vs. fission is that fusion can give us much more energy. But fission can give enough energy now for decades, and much more cheaply.
I wouldn't advocate shutting down fission plants with the expectation that they'd be replaced by fusion in the immediate future, obviously, but some of the non-ITER work might end up viable sooner than a lot of people expect.
It's still not going to be ready tomorrow, but it doesn't require building the eighth wonder of the world.