Physicists having been maintained on a payroll will be the only material outcome of ITER, in the end, along with a likelihood of hundreds of tons of radioactive slag to dispose of. (If canceled before they light it up, it could be productively scrapped at a fractional penny on the dollar. Once it's hot, it becomes an indefinitely expensive liability.)
There are few other places just now to train up plasma fluid physicists. The main beneficiaries, though, are the contractors. This is a gravy train that just doesn't quit. The reasons so much money easily goes to it have far more to do with corporate welfare for otherwise mainly-military contractors, and maintaining a population of hot-neutron physicists ready to draw on for weapons work, than any conceivable expectation of competitive power generation.
But the main product of the Tokamak-adjacent projects is lies. They cultivate the confusion between "Q>1" meaning more kinetic energy of neutrons emitted than microwave photons injected and magnets energized, vs "Q>1" meaning electrical power to the grid exceeding grid power injected. There are at least two orders of magnitude between the two Qs. Achieving the former leaves you very, very far from the latter. ITER itself makes no pretense of ever producing so much as one watt-hour of grid power.
Thus, any system resembling ITER (particularly ITER itself) is a technological dead end. A fusion power plant that relies on hot neutrons would necessarily cost many, many times as much to build and operate as a comparable fission plant. Big fission is already not competitive (perhaps mainly from deeply entrenched official corruption, but so what?) and gets less so every day. We have yet to see whether small-scale fission can work, economically. It has failed before.
The Helion and TAE systems would be "aneutronic", generating power electromagnetically, without a side trip through neutrons, heat, and a turbine. They have a chance to be useful, because they would be cheap to operate, even at a small enough scale to leave little scope for official corruption. TAE is taking the harder road, chasing hydrogen/boron fusion, which reactants are both extremely abundant. Helion is chasing hydrogen-2/helium-3, which is more plausibly achievable, but helium-3 is very scarce, so they would need to synthesize it themselves by also fusing hydrogen-2.
The Princeton FRC reactor project, not mentioned in TFA, is working on a shoestring NASA budget, hoping to loft a 2 MW space-probe propulsion test in 2035. That might work, and they would not need much helium-3 for that. They could probably get something done much earlier if ITER were not pissing away all the money, but moving money from public to private purses (as with NASA's SLS and DoD's F-35) is ITER's true purpose.