Gas is an excellent compliment for renewables. It scales up and down quickly, and can cover all the weak spots around intermittency and dunkelflautes. The carbon emissions are relatively low too, because in renewables/battery heavy grid the actual quantity of gas needed is relatively small.

The problem arises in importing gas from unstable places.

All of that is right... But we needed something to make batteries competitive with gas, because the renewables part is already solved, and we need to move to the next step.