This is 30+ year design lifetime infrastructure. Investments were made on that basis: no one is going to turn off anything.
Which is the best argument in favor of otherwise ludicrously inefficient power-to-gas storage schemes: if you could, by some miracle, undercut fracking extraction, then at the very least you'd only have to bankrupt the well-operators - not the pipeline, export terminals etc.
But I'm extremely skeptical this is possible and it will be fought against dirtily (see the anti-wind power campaigners).
The thing is you pay for all of that pretty heavily - it's all more expensive with other drawbacks, but it's not nearly the complete pain that handling hydrogen is.
[1]https://www.solarpaces.org/why-solar-sulphur-cycle-ideal-sea...
On that relevant metric, hydrogen is very hard to beat, particularly if proper geology is available (salt formations for solution mined storage cavities). Costs less than $1/kWh are possible.
Artificially heated geothermal may be competitive on that metric, but its RTE is likely to be even lower.
There's an order of magnitude more companies and hype around those use cases than there are around actually important ones.
What this ignores is that hydrogen must still be made even in a post-fossil fuel economy. It's not optional. Production of ammonia requires hydrogen, and without ammonia-derived nitrogen fertilizer billions of people will starve. About half the nitrogen atoms in your body came from synthetic ammonia.
The meme is really weird. In all other applications, we assume that fossil fuels will be displaced, by law and force if necessary. But somehow SMR will always be used to make hydrogen; the technology will somehow be immune to the forces that will be deployed against all other fossil fuel uses. It's really crazy when examined closely.