Yes you might be able to get away with chemical lasers with one-time cartridges, or even fluid charges... assuming it can be made to give more bang for the weight/volume as missiles or 20mm.

My gut sense is that DE will make bigger inroads, faster, in surface installations or ground vehicles. For aircraft there's a lot of power and cooling issues which have to be overcome... for a bottomless magazine which is only useful until you run out of gas. Surface applications don't have the endurance problem, so they benefit from a bottomless magazine. Especially fixed emplacements and nuclear powered warships (DE might even instigate the return of nuclear power to navy cruisers).

I’m pretty sure the empty space vacated by the lift fan in the F-35A is still set up to use the lift fan transmission to create power for directed energy weapons.

Funny!
There is no lift fan in the F-35A.

Now if you mean the USMC version, the F-35B, then we can save a lot fo space by just getting rid of the airplane altogether!

Yes, the “empty space vacated”, as in I know it’s not in the A model, by the lift fan is set up with the gearbox still in place to power a directed energy weapon.

Ah....I understand now what you were trying to say.

The F-111 Aardvark (McNamara’s SECOND folly) had technology that really pushed (and perhaps even pushed past) what technology could do at the time in a whole lot of its components, technology soon to be replaced by just finding a better technology altogether.p. Originally, it had some of the most capable (if unreliable) analog computers ever built. But when those analog computers were replaced by digital ones that took a tiny fraction of the electrical output, it had enough power to operate some serious jammers, and as the “Spark Vark” the EF-111 was really pretty capable in that role - as long as the rest of the aircraft happened to be working that day.

I was flying one night over Mountain Home with an old "111er." He said you don't want to live there, lest a "Vark" fall on you.

Yep, potential game-changer to neutralize air power.

Yeah, I lived not too far from there as a kid, I remember that being an issue.