To be fair though, I don't believe Sabine is involved in any nuclear fusion research, so changing her mind on this doesn't necessarily put her own funding at risk. Changing your mind is easy when your next meal doesn't depend on continuing to believe something.
In fact, she might even stand to gain if funding gets diverted from fusion research towards other projects.
If she was then she would have realized how ridiculous it is to directly compare Q performance between MCF and ICF machines, using Q as the metric to track progress, and not once uttering the words "triple product". This piece has about as much investigation as I put into the doneness of my toast.
A high Q machine is expensive. It's by nature a nuclear facility, which adds a few zeroes to the cost. Nuclear fusion machines needs tritium fuel, which is made in exactly one breeder on the planet. In general a fusion machine just being nuclear doesn't add much scientific value.
The plasma physics for making a better (cheaper) reactor has been pushed in smaller machines, as shown by better triple product values and empirical scaling laws. Triple product is a measure of how well the plasma is confined. That's the metric to focus on (when accounting for the fact that the science machines are small with scaling laws). In that regard, we have made excellent progress.
A high Q machine (such as ITER) is valuable because it lets us study burning plasmas. It's an expensive pill to swallow but an essential step towards making a real reactor. Qtotal = 1 is a nothingburher. Qplasma = 1 is also a nothingburger, but at least going past that barrier grants new knowledge.
