Should this kind of observation be especially surprising for anyone? There are some round-trip inefficiencies to any energy conversion and/or storage system, so using electricity directly if you can is always going to be better than storage - that doesn't mean storage is bad or less important, but it's a tool that we should try and reserve as much as possible for when it's really needed.

It's easy to demonstrate the same thing on a small scale - at my house with hot water heating for example, I run my electric (heat pump) storage hot water heater in the middle of the day, and it almost always runs 100% from solar power (sometimes with extremely cloudy or rainy weather it uses some grid power). I don't have a battery system yet, but I'm doing the sums - and if I relied on instantaneous electric hot water heating so was heating water on demand mostly outside solar hours, even before thinking about the lower round-trip efficiency I'd need a far bigger (and therefore much more expensive) battery system than I will now for the same hot water load.

If you're in an area that has less sunshine but more wind energy, the principle is basically the same, you just have to time it for when there's excess wind energy, but it just seems very obvious that if you can shift high energy use tasks to those times that's always going to be more effective than using batteries, and doing so makes the battery storage cheaper for the electricity use that you really need it for...