And had we continued to develop and improve upon fission we'd probably be in a better place.

You mean like tearing a hole in the fabric of space and time and opening a hell portal to another dimension?

People also said the same thing about wind and solar, and those still have some downsides but they are also rapidly becoming the cheapest current form of peak energy, or with cheaper grid storage, energy period.

Sci-if authors have been talking about both solar and fusion for years, and now solar has been industrialized why wouldn’t we be excited to see progression in fusion?

The negative effect of nuclear were known in 1927 (Hermann Joseph Meller). It would be surprising if we discovered another form of radiation, given calculations lead us far further without showing new forms of radiations.