No it’s an air defence weapon not a light show, they purposely intersect the beams to create plasma to target missiles and planes - a super hot ball of plasma is impossible to defend against and can move as fast as the motors on the laser turrets can reorientate, like how searchlights move faster than planes or now you can just pivot your hips to keep a F1 car in the frame of your camera rather than running along beside it.

It’s got a lot of huge advantages like not requiring ammo so in theory could just slice through a fleet of drones or dozens of decoy missiles without extra cost or logistics however the energy costs are huge so it might not be a fully realisable tool.

I actually think that them sinking billions into r&d but ending up with an impractical device could be why there’s enough drama to get this in the senate - it’s also possible that the whole hearing is designed to look like a poor cover up of the plasma tech so that China thinks it works and invests in r&d only to waste time and effort. The CIA used to do similar to Russia all the time with things like remote viewing.

Certainly I can’t think of a reason aliens would be zigzagging around in busy sky, where as it being a secret test project would also explain all the ‘cover up’ stuff about high level agents taking radar data and telling people not to talk about it, etc.