Technically it's not! The most effective known way of compressing fusion fuel is to generate an insanely high x-ray pressure using a fission primary. We've been doing that since the 50s! But these have, ahem, other issues for energy purposes.

To achieve ignition temperatures in the fuel pellet, you need really large pressures. Stagnation pressures in previous NIF shots are on the order of 1-10 gigabar, or 800 terapascal; similar attempts at OMEGA, a similar laser facility, have achieved lower but still very high pressures of about 200 gigapascal using direct laser ablation rather than using the laser to produce x-rays. Laser and x-ray ablation are well suited to producing such high pressures, because they can dump a lot of energy into the target very very fast; this allows the ablated layer to reach high energy densities before anything can really start moving.

There are other ways to do it, maybe! For instance there's a startup called First Light which is trying to use light gas guns to produce the requisite pressures using physical impacts. They may have gotten this idea from a somewhat infamous nuclear physicist named Friedwardt Winterberg, who proposed a number of interesting mechanisms for compressing fusion fuel. Like this idea to use a hypervelocity projectile to adiabatically compress a high-atomic-weight gas, which will then get hot enough to ignite the fuel pellet!