That's the issue, the hydrogen push (especially in the media) is just oil/gas sneaking their continued fossil fuel use to the future. Has been since George Bush II was pushing hydrogen as a green alternative 10-15 years ago in his role as faithful smiling face of the fossil fuel industry.
It continues today. The research at is core is valuable because of course hydrogen and fuel cells have applications. But you are correct:
It's always positioned as "don't do BEVs, use hydrogen for this for EVERYTHING".
Which is really "the tell" that hydrogen continues to be a trojan horse for continued carbon emissions by the oil and gas companies. If it weren't your point is precisely right: it would simply be presented as "here is a use of hydrogen in this specific use case that is useful".
Granted some of this is the usual hype/lying/fraud done by some startup to garner investment, attention, and interest by any means possible. But who funds these hydrogen startups? Oh right...
It's very similar to the constant barrage of nuclear stories. Both petroleum and nuclear are existentially threatened by the current (and future) economics of BEVs, batteries, solar, and wind. They aren't competitive now, and the economies of scale and technological maturity of all of those technologies is still in active improvement in terms of year-on-year 5-15% improvements.
I certainly won't support any hydrogen "scheme" for a decade at least. Hydrogen is in the same boat as any nuclear startup or new project: MAYBE you have an economic case against solar/wind/battery ... based on today's prices.
But they all have ten year lead times, practically speaking. Hydrogen at any scale is a huge infrastructure buildout. And their value proposition, aside from the oil/gas trojan horse of hydrogen-from-methane, is based on CURRENT solar/wind/battery prices.
In the ten years between when some huge civilization push for nuclear or hydrogen comes, what will the effective price of solar/battery/wind be? NO ONE knows, but at 5-15% is probably a likely improvement curve for the next ten years, barring significant materials and approach breakthroughs like some dramatic perovskite solar cell or some phenomally good solid state battery cell hitting the market (all of which are theoretically possible).
And at a minimum, if any hydrogen or nuclear boondoggle steals investment and attention and policy focus and consumers from BEVs and wind/solar, it is a win for these existentially threatened industries, likely full of executives who are riding sinking ships to retirement and stock option bonuses rather than actually migrate the companies to long term sustainability.
They didn't care about the sustainability of the planet, so why would they care about their companies sustainability?