Yes, and when you have already paid the environmental cost of hydro, it's a good tradeoff. If you need to destroy new large parts of your ecology and display people, it's a much trickier decision. I'm not fundamentally opposed to hydro including building new dams, but it's important people are aware that they have both massive ecological and humanitarian challenges, and create a long term maintenance commitment (or they become potentially disastrous) that means they're not no brainers. When they're still a decent fit, they're then absolutely a good complement to other renewable resources.

A similar dynamic between Spain and France: Spain sells wind to France, France sells nuclear to Spain.

> Expanding storage capacity is generally a problem because of the massive environmental impact

Meh. It could be put completely underground. (We could put nuclear power plants hundreds of meters deep underground too.) People don't want to spend on it is the real problem.

That’s not really a counterpoint. That hydro isn’t an infinite source of energy isn’t remarkable.

The point is not that it isn't infinite, but that you can't rely on it always being available, just as with wind or solar. You still need fallbacks unless you over dimension massively, and over dimensioning hydro storage comes with massive ecological impact.