For decades, fusion researchers struggled with neutron isotropy, a key indicator of scalable plasma stability. Zap Energy’s latest results show its FuZE device avoids the pitfalls of past Z pinch failures, generating isotropic neutrons that confirm thermal fusion is occurring.
This is indeed a significant step forward. This is sort of like the situation with fission in that there are two sorts of fission -- thermal and fast. "Fast" reactors have no moderator and use the neutrons that are ejected by a fission event directly to cause the next fission. "Thermal" reactors rely on a moderator; that thing (usually water or, in some designs graphite) slows down the neutrons into what is known as the "thermal" range.
The latter is much more effective at causing another fission than "fast" neutrons, thus you can make the core larger -- thus the usable size of the reactor goes up which is a good thing if you want to make lots of power or, in the alternative, you can make the entire thing smaller and more-stable if you don't need a really big one, but the minimum size goes up too (since you need the space for the moderator.)
Likewise with fusion; you want "thermal" fusion in that the neutrons emitted are coherent because that tells you the fusion that is occurring is due to the heat and pressure in the plasma rather than an isolated event from acceleration of the hydrogen (caused by, for example, striking it with a laser or injecting it via an accelerator.)
The problem is that they still generated the fusion using beam injection, so no, this isn't "imminent wildly-above unity" energy output. That remains to be demonstrated; essentially to do so you have to show that what you're injecting is basically "make-up" for what is fusing rather than being the cause of the fusion.
Thus this is a step forward, but until you see demonstration of the latter imminent way-beyond-unity energy output (that is, much more than what you put in to cause the fusion) isn't on the immediate horizon. Don't kid yourself on how far you have to go for that either; being "a bit" over unity is nowhere near useful fusion for (as an example) generating electricity -- you need to get wildly beyond the input power required for that to become practical.