I've been seeing some variant of this article for as long as I remember. The return of the airship feels like aviation's fusion at this point.
Correct title should be "Airships Rise Again, Again".
Every 10 years we seem to forget how little weight these things can actually carry and start dreaming again of cruise ships in the sky.
There's an old essay I can no longer find showing that airships are way too costly for their speed and payload capacities. There's a curve and they are simply way off it.
About the only use case that makes sense is picking up a moderately heavy payload in a remote location that severely lacks infrastructure, assuming you can (1) wait several days and (2) the weather is nice and predictable. Very niche.
Hot air balloons, gliders, airships seem much more casual. Not so much fighting with gravity as making a kind of gentleman's agreement with it.
I think that's why we might romanticize them. It is certainly a big reason I do.
In a sense, it is even worse. At least, fusion is a hard engineering and physics problem with many unknowns, we know we can make progress, and we do, slowly. Airships are well understood, the physics has been known since Archimedes (ok, with a little bit of fluid dynamics), and on the engineering side of things, we already know how to make every single part, we might get some improvement: lighter envelopes, more efficient engines, etc... but no amount of engineering will change the fact that we will need a huge bag of gas to lift a comparatively small payload, slowly.