I vehemently agree with your impression that a lot of that is pushed by misinformed interest, trying to hawk one more century of steam-reforming and other polluting ideas. However, a couple of processes do need hydrogen, chief among them is making steel: the coke-based approach generates far too much CO2.

If you are a little allergic to calling hydrogen blue or green, depending on how much greenwashing it receives, that might not be the best keywords to type in a search engine. But hydrogen should become a needed industrial step for the world's second or third most widely used commodity (it goes: sand, cement, steel, glass, gravel, petroleum, macadam, wheat…)

I’m not sure what’s #2 on the list of actual hydrogen uses, as most big potential applications could use an easier fuel to handle than a literal cloud of angry protons. It's often a good first step, though: ammonia, synthetic methane, etc.

Far down that list, there’s also a project to put hydrogen back into dirigibles, which I find very engrossing (and yes, the people working on that have heard of the Hindenburg), but it's less solid than making steel.

Hydrogen could be very useful for CO2-free iron smelting, powering cargo ships, and many other use cases. The problem is getting it - cheap green hydrogen requires excess green power, something we don’t have yet.

Hydrogen will probably not happen for transportation, but it is a serious contender for power grid backup.

We are finding renewable pocket of helium, why do you want it not to happen ?