I'm not sure, but we can try to figure out what is going on. And by the way I'm a physics layman too. I just read a lot of books about fission and a few about fusion too, it happens to be my hobby. When I'm bored, the bookmarks that I browse are [1] and [2].
So, when reports state that the a certain temperature was achieved and sustained for a certain period of time, what are they actually saying? We could go and find an article and get into some details, but I imagine they say that somewhere in the plasma that temperature was reached and sustained. But it is quite likely that that region is quite microscopic, maybe a very, very thin inner torus inside a larger torus. There is a gradient of temperature from the region where the announced temperature happens to the walls of the device. But one way or another that thin inner region can't have a surface area of anything close to 1 square meter. To get to 1 GW of power, you need 10^-12 square meters, and to get to 10 MW you need 10^-14 m2. That's about the surface area of a torus of (circular) length 3 m and diameter 1 femtometer. 1 femtometer is roughly the size of a nucleus of deuterium or tritium, so in principle this is the minimum diameter of a torus where you can talk about fusion.
So, when reports state that the a certain temperature was achieved and sustained for a certain period of time, what are they actually saying? We could go and find an article and get into some details, but I imagine they say that somewhere in the plasma that temperature was reached and sustained. But it is quite likely that that region is quite microscopic, maybe a very, very thin inner torus inside a larger torus. There is a gradient of temperature from the region where the announced temperature happens to the walls of the device. But one way or another that thin inner region can't have a surface area of anything close to 1 square meter. To get to 1 GW of power, you need 10^-12 square meters, and to get to 10 MW you need 10^-14 m2. That's about the surface area of a torus of (circular) length 3 m and diameter 1 femtometer. 1 femtometer is roughly the size of a nucleus of deuterium or tritium, so in principle this is the minimum diameter of a torus where you can talk about fusion.
[1] https://www.ncnr.nist.gov/resources/n-lengths/
[2] https://www.oecd-nea.org/janisweb/