We can't ignore the opportunity costs. Every cent of money and effort we put towards digging fossil fuels out of the ground is money and effort we don't spend towards developing new and better sources of renewable energy. Even if the opportunity for short-term revenue is better for the former, the latter is going to secure cheap, sustainable, long-term energy independence for all of us. If we want to lift people out of energy poverty, we want to do so permanently, not in a way that leaves them back in poverty again after all our sources run out.
This is a great point, but I think it cuts both ways. If a place doesn't get electrified until it can be done so with renewables, then there are people who e.g. are dying from the pollution from their wood cook fires in the meantime. I think I've also read though that being able to deploy solar and wind on a smaller scale makes for faster electrification in some place where it would be harder to build out a giant power plant and grid, so maybe you're right in any case.
I'm a huge proponent of trying to build solar microgrids in as many places as possible; a system where every small municipality has its own local solar microgrid with battery storage, each self-sufficient but patched into a much larger grid that can help balance load and smooth over local failures in eachother's microgrids would be a way to allow the highest level of energy independence possible and avoids the pitfalls of centralization while still getting the benefits of a large-scale grid. It could be an incredibly resilient and sustainable system if well implemented. The only barrier to it as it stands is the cost to install all these solar panels and batteries.
