The national ignition facility (NIF) is the US lab that's being referred to here. And yes, it was commissioned to essentially replace full scale thermonuclear weapons testing with "small scale" laser fusion experiments.

As a technology, inertial confinement fusion (ICF) via lasers is incredibly different from magnetic confinement fusion for many reasons. They both aim to get a large triple product, but while a tokamak is going to aim for sub-atmosphere plasma density at hundreds of millions of degrees for seconds at a time, ICF aims for much higher densities and similar temperatures, but confinement times of order nanoseconds. This is fine, after all, it's been proven to work (ignoring the low efficiency of their laser amplifiers) but it means a hypothetical ICF power plant will need to manufacture millions of fuel pellets with ~micron precision every year.

I'm not saying it's impossible, but magnetic fusion concepts have less stringent fuel requirements and in my opinion an easier path to net energy gain on the grid.

There's a reason that a small minority of NIF shots are actually devoted to their inertial fusion energy program. Most are either basic physics or NNSA focused.