The NIF was never intended to produce power, but it serves as a good science experiment for understanding the challenges of inertial confinement fusion. You need to make something that works before you can make something that works better.
The only fusion devices humanity has yet gotten to produce net power are thermonuclear bombs. Laser fusion tries to replicate those conditions as best as possible without detonating a fission primary. Yes, this means laser fusion is good for validating nuclear bomb models, but it's also the only route to fusion where we know for a fact that every issue is strictly an engineering problem.
ITER is magnetic confinement fusion - the plasma is heated to extreme temperatures but at low density. While theoretically it looks like a much more promising route to a practical fusion reactor, as far as we know there has never been a net-positive magnetically confined fusion reaction in the universe. Plasma physics is incredibly complicated and we've run into a long series of issues with plasma instabilities, we believe that these issues will be overcome but we still can't rule out some unknown physics which renders it impossible.
I personally believe tokamaks like ITER will be the route that leads to energy generation, but putting all our eggs in one basket is risky and inertial confinement experiments like NIF let us answer fundamentally different questions about reality.
The only fusion devices humanity has yet gotten to produce net power are thermonuclear bombs. Laser fusion tries to replicate those conditions as best as possible without detonating a fission primary. Yes, this means laser fusion is good for validating nuclear bomb models, but it's also the only route to fusion where we know for a fact that every issue is strictly an engineering problem.