LENR has had to have a name change because the primary connotation with cold fusion is a bunch of psuedoscience and bullshit.
Yes, some real scientists have published some results that make continued study worthwhile, but if regular fusion is 50 years off, our indication is that LENR, if it's even possible, is 100.
My own idea is that plasma micro-bubbles are hot enough to cause nuclear fusion somehow.
[0]: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/scientists-in-the-u...
I don't think the hundred or so scientists at a bunch of disparate universities are part of some conspiracy to push quack science, but something is up when there is no theoretical framework that even begins to explain your results, no one outside of your community can reproduce it, and your results are still just "well that's weird" vs. "we have something we can build off to actually produce energy"
However, you can look at results produced by Akito Takahashi[0]. Are they convincing enough for you?
[0]: https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/BiberianJPjcondensedzb.pdf...
We know how to make fission reactors, we have many of them operating right now. We could build more this very second.
Lab results that show some evidence for trace amounts of fusion reactions do not imply net energy production. E.g. one of the recently announced results needed a powerful xray beamline to get some tiny results, which consumed more energy than the fusion reactions ever released.
This is comparable to the ancient greeks inventing a "steam engine"[1] that does no meaningful work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeolipile