NIF is not for power plant research. It's an end run around the nuclear test ban treaty. The US signed a treaty promising to not conduct any nuclear weapons tests. So the NIF creates a functional equivalent by smashing energy from 192 high energy lasers into a very small space, the interior of a hohlraum. At the center of the hohlraum is a tiny capsule of deuterium and tritium. And under all that energy, for a brief moment, some of the tritium and deuterium fuse.

Well, if the definition of "net energy" keeps expanding to include more of the experimental infrastructure, that is progress and we are just splitting hairs about wording - which is a real waste, considering they are one of the few groups with consistent tangible experimental improvements.

In 2021, that was 1.3 megajoules, or net in comparison to the energy absorbed by the fuel. This is a bigger milestone at 2.5 megajoules, since it is in reference to the energy in the lasers themselves.

This is just popular scientific journalism/clickbaiting, they also claim it "provides unlimited, cheap, clean power" which is also not true precisely speaking.