Let's say you have a medium city, like Columbus, OH. This city purchases about 890 GWh of electricity per year [1] for costumers and street lights. Let's say they need to store 100 GWh. A kg of matter raised 1 meter stores about 10 joules, or watt-seconds. We need to store 100 times 3600 billion of watt-seconds, which is 360 trillion. You can trade mass for height. For example you can raise 36 trillion kg to a height of 1 meter. That's 36 billion tons or gigatons (GT). Or you can raise 3.6 GT to a height of 10 meters, just 36 MT to a 1km hight.
Let's say you want to use blocks of stone. The total US production of blocks of stone in 2021 was 2.3 million tons [2]. You need 15 times as much to only cover Columbus, OH, and only assuming a 100% efficiency in the conversion of the energy from electricity to gravitational potential energy and back.
The only substance that can be useful for this type of storage is water. But even for water, you need the same huge quantities. 36 million tons of water is a lake with a surface area of 1 square kilometer and a depth of 36 meters. If you have some mountains around you, then you can do it. But Columbus, OH is out of luck. It does not have mountains, or even hills around it. Building an artificial hill that's 1000 meters tall, that has a 1 km2 lake at the top with a depth of 36 meters is a monumental undertaking, that was never attempted.
Of course, you can try to play around with the tradeoffs. Maybe you build a lower hill with a larger footprint. But how long is it going to take to offset the emissions from such a huge construction project?
Bottom line: pumped hydro makes sense, if geography allows you. If not, it is uneconomical by many orders of magnitude.
[1] https://www.columbus.gov/greenpower/ [2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2022/mcs2022-stone-dime...