During the "Cold Fusion" era, when Pons & Fleishman had claimed to develop room temperature fusion, I worked for a major US lab doing superconductor research. (We invented the first superconductors that operated at liquid nitrogen temperatures-- Y1B2C3O)
While fusion isn't our area of investigation we, being physicists, were curious. We managed to get our hands on a pre-print of the Pons & Fleishman study and did our own experiments.
We kept this very hush hush. We didn't want it getting out that we were doing the experiments or people would claim that we replicated them.
So, I believe that SpaceX and other companies are experimenting with this, and if they found good results (as the eagle works tests imply they would) they would continue to do so, but in secret.)
We eventually published our paper because we constructed a novel experiment that disproved the P&F observation, from our perspective.
None-the-less, true to our fears, this was later reported by "Mondo 2000" (The "arse technica" crossed with WIRED of the day) that we had "confirmed cold fusion is real!!1!1". The letter to the editor I wrote and got our most eminent physicist to sign was never printed by the magazine (IIRC).
When you get to the fringes-- that's where the action is-- but it's also where you can have confusing or odd results.
And even 30 years ago the media was not trustworthy enough to reveal these results to. Our paper was published in a journal, and yet the media still mis represented the results.