I have always viewed these as concept vessels. Not a complete waste of money, because they were test beds, but...not well spent money either.
In my opinion, you don’t spend money on a class of vessels as test beds, you take the concept of the USS Albacore which is a museum in Portsmouth, NH, where even though it was conventionally powered, it pioneered a lot of the concepts of future attack subs in it. It was never meant as a class.
And the Zumwalts are big. I drive by Bath, ME relatively often, and have seen one or the other of them being built there, and I was always surprised at how huge they were for a “destroyer”...they displace only a few thousand tons less than a Baltimore class heavy cruiser of WWII vintage.
They won’t last long
The Zumwalts are called destroyers to enable them to get funding.
They are really cruiser.