Here are a couple of small fusion projects that get a decent amount of peer-reviewed publications and respect from other fusion researchers. They're both attempting boron fusion, which is almost completely aneutronic.

https://lppfusion.com/: literally a garage-size experiment. The reactor core is the size of a coffee can and that's big enough for the production reactor. It's a "plasma focus," in which the plasma pinches itself into a tiny ball. Team is half a dozen people, and they have endless engineering issues that a bigger team would probably knock out a lot faster, but they keep at it and put out a detailed progress report every month or so. It's been pretty fun to watch over the years. They've gotten the plasma to boron fusion temperatures (a couple million degrees C), but density is still a challenge.

https://hb11.energy/: A terawatt nanosecond laser hits a target that generates a 4000-tesla magnetic field. Then a petawatt picosecond laser blasts the fuel pellet. It's not like normal laser fusion that compresses a target; it just hits from one side, so hard that it shoves the nuclei into their neighbors behind them. In theory this can kick off boron fusion, and according to some experiments (not entirely by HB11's team) this actually works a lot better than expected due to a cascading reaction.

What's great about that one is that the petawatt lasers have been improving exponentially, at a faster rate than Moore's Law. They're just now getting to the point where theoretically they'd produce net power from boron fusion, with a large energy gain. The lasers aren't even that big or expensive, they're basically tabletop devices in a medium-size room, costing a few tens of millions.

HB11 Energy, the company, just got seed funding, but their lead researcher (Hora) has been talking about this for decades and wrote a book about it, and experiments have been done by various independent researchers around the world.

Thank you, I had not seen these before.

The simple "airplane" they flew was enormously less of a technical challenge than a fusion reactor.

The days of easy, made-in-the-garage inventions are way over. Nuclear fusion reactors will not be created in some garage.

We need serious government money funding many labs and groups or a massive Manhattan project.

We're talking about making a miniature star in a box.

Says someone who will never create an easy, made-in-the-garage invention.

Attitude is everything

Attitude is not everything. It matters, but there are material factors in the world that are hard constraints no matter how you approach the problem.

For example, you cannot simply create a fusion reactor by “really wanting it” and “being smart” and “thinking outside the box”. You have to have all of those traits, plus extensive knowledge of physics and access to rare, expensive materials/tools in order to make a solution due to the tremendous temperatures and complex reactions happening.

The Wright Brothers had comparatively few obstacles in terms of physics. They did not need to acquire a material able to withstand 100 million degrees of heat, for instance. They did not need to understand the mechanics of a fusion reaction, which is orders of magnitude more complex than the mechanics of the Wright Brothers’ aircraft in flight.

Many useful inventions can be created with few resources. Creativity matters. But acting like attitude and elbow grease is “everything” is naive, especially in the context of nuclear fusion research.

In fairness, resources have also scaled. What's a few hundred million when that much only buys a tenth of a Duolingo?

This is exactly why moonshot projects such as this exist. Even though toroidal MCF machines clearly are the most conservative choice and funding levels aren't nearly as high as is necessary to build a reactor in the near future, society says "what's a few million dollars to keep on turning over rocks? There might be a shiny coin under one."