Look at LFSCOE instead of LCOE. The electric grid can absorb a bit of intermittency relatively cheaply, but then you need to account for the system costs.

Or LACE, or Lazard's "Cost of Firming Intermittency" or whatever metric you want...

The systematic bias against renewables and irrational exuberance around nuclear is true across all of those metrics.

Even people that make their living on renewables underestimate how quickly it gets cheap. Jenny Chase, famous for pointing out that people underestimate the pace of solar technology, also underestimates solar technology.

And the skepticism of batteries is similar. I can't tell you how many nuclear advocates have said in past years that grid-scale batteries are impossible because of "physics." Yes literally "physics" that they can't quite seem to cite.

It's just a continual shifting of goal posts as people's systematic bias against batteries are again and again disproven by actual deployments and costs.