The dude down on his hunkers in that last photo only needs his baseball cap on backwards to portray MY feelings about the article. Ten times hotter than the core of the Sun? Surrounded by flimsy stainless tubing and glass! I was born at night......
You are conflating temperature and total energy. The Sun is not a point source, but in comparison to the Sun, this fusion reactor is. Note that most of the core of the sun is not undergoing fusion at any point in time and the energy released from the tiny percentage that is must heat up the rest, the idle rest, in order for fusion to continue. The fusion reactor the Chinese built only has to heat up a limited amount of fuel as it is fed in. All the released energy can be harvested rather than dissipated into the mass of the sun.
If they could make it last longer than tiny fractions of a second, they’d be crowing about it. If they could achieve net energy output, they’d be crowing about it.
That being said, the US should not fall behind whomever the Chinese stole this technology from.