Everyone already knew fusion was possible, after all it happens everyday in the sun and we know how to make fusion bombs. For a fun science project you can even make
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor at home and get started fusing atoms right in the comfort of your home. The NIF news is a good step, but it is quite far from a working fusion reactor. For one, it is a single shot reaction after which significant recharge time is required; it is not a steady state reaction. Secondly, it may have been energy positive when measuring energy released vs laser energy in, but you cannot charge (these kind of) lasers with heat. The electrical energy required to pump the lasers was much much bigger than the energy released. Converting the heat energy to electricity would run into all sorts of efficiency losses as well, most notably the Carnot efficiency which states that for any set of practical temperatures (ie with a reasonable cooling source like a river and with a turbine operating temperature that doesn't melt the turbine blades) the efficiency won't be all that much higher than 60% or so.
BTW, it made front page on all of the news publications I regularly follow so I don't see this as being ignored so much as that it is merely one item in a huge stream of other important news.