This works in a totally different way, by heating a tiny target fuel pellet with a laser to cause it to collapse and trigger fusion through basically heating and squeezing: more like how a bomb works. It's not easy to see a direct path from this approach to a power plant, but it might involve lining up a steady stream of fuel targets and doing this in a sort of pulsed mode.
Other approaches attempt to create a continuous plasma where fusion can occur confined in a powerful magnetic field, and heated by radio waves to get it going. So there's always fusion happening rather than in short bursts.
In principle inertial confinement is not much different from internal combustion engines where piston compresses the mix, and the explosion energy is harvested. Here lasers compress the mix, and the explosion energy is not yet harvested (but measured).
Tokamaks (the other approach) are more like jet engines in that they sustain burning. But currently the burning in tokamaks requires more energy than it generates.
I personally believed so since a while ago, for that exact reason. Although I was thinking more of miniaturizing the existing bomb design where fusion material is surrounded by a fission shell made of material with lower critical mass. But I am no expert either.
Other approaches attempt to create a continuous plasma where fusion can occur confined in a powerful magnetic field, and heated by radio waves to get it going. So there's always fusion happening rather than in short bursts.