Too many new chemistries these days for that to hold true universally. Especially the sodium stuff.

Any such argument needs to accurately account for the relative ease of recycling lithium ion batteries, and the existence of batteries with significantly longer lifespans like iron air, compressed air (eg Hydroster) and pumped hydro

It's not like lithium-ion batteries have a fixed number of cycles. It depends heavily on how you use them. At reasonable temperatures and keeping within 30-70% SOC they last a lot, lot longer than if you use them fully or at elevated temperatures.

For something like a big battery station, you can easily ensure the optimal battery conditions for long life.

And then there's using alternate chemistries as mentioned.

Such people are simply wrong/misinformed or spreading misinformation. The latter category is a significant factor as there is quite a bit of oil and gas money flowing into lobbying and misinformation campaigns. So just want to call that out as a thing. There are a lot of disingenuous voices in debates about this stuff pushing this or that agenda with fabricated horse shit.

But to summarize: this is not an issue. Not even a little bit. There are no nasty surprises involving batteries suddenly not working because they flaked out after a few months/years/whatever in the grid storage industry. This simply doesn't happen. Sure, individual battery cells might fail and then they get replaced or disabled. But there is zero indication that that is in anyway a frequent thing or a big deal in the industry. Mostly all we have is success stories. New batteries get deployed. News flash! They work exactly as advertised and operators save some money.

This is of course not surprising. Batteries used for grid storage are built to certain specifications. And that includes specifying how long they are expected to last (measured in charge cycles typically). So, all that is factored into the cost of the setup. Mostly all indications are that grid batteries are 1) very reliable and predictable 2) work exactly as advertised 3) might reasonably be expected to continue working quite long beyond their rated life time.