In theory yes
In practice no because fully columated is impossible to make without electronic / magnetic focusing so you still get beam spread, not quite to the level of the inverse square law but we are all familiar with it which is why I said it .
The image clearly shows long tubes which means it was a glass tube columnator
We had a laser welder in the lab at TAFE because it was cutting edge technology and going to be the future of metals joining which of course never eventuated
I cant remember exactly what the power was because while I did play with it a couple of time I did not teach it .
What I do remember was it was a ruby laser, had a 20Amp 3 phase power supply and could jsut barely manage to weld 2 pieces of aluminium foil 1 metre away , and that was in a vacuum .
In air you get massive amounts of scatter cause by air molecules, dust & water
Now it may be just for artistic purposes but they show a green lazer in the photo and back then most lazers start as infra-red ( very high energy ) light and then get filtered down to very short wave length green . Green was very popular because of it's very short wavelength which in turn reduces the beam spread, but it cuts down the energy transmitted by near 1/2 as the infra red then passes through a green filter although it is not like a white light filter, it is a secondary light filter , they used to be a single crystal Li salt of some kind .
Also if you can see the beam ( could have been painted in ) from the sides then you are loosing light .
If you get a green & red laser level for instance and shine them on the same surface, the green will be a lot smaller than the red .
It will appear to be more intense but that is just a trick of human eye sight as the red will have a lot more energy, but we see green light better .
You can not see a real laser beam traveling through space unless there is some thing for it to reflect off like smoke
