It’s actually much much less dead-end than chemical rockets are. There’s a lot of technological possibility for nuclear rockets, thanks to the energy density of nuclear power.

In theory you could even do fusion rockets in the far future, but we’d need to figure out fusion for that first.

But like, fusion rockets might be the holy grail for space travel, short of maybe antimatter rockets (but you can imagine the complications in that). This chain of technologies is absolutely something worth exploring.