The argument for hydrogen has to do with energy density. There are certain use cases where batteries are just too heavy, but hydrogen, with its higher energy density, is not. Maybe that will change in the future, but as it stands now, energy density is a significant barrier to adoption of battery/electric in certain areas. The cost of energy doesn't matter if it can't be used due to batteries being too heavy.
It's possible to imagine a future where both fuel sources have found their place, depending on context. Doesn't have to be an either/or.
The fallacy with that argument is that hydrogen's volumetric energy density is very low.
In liquid form, methane has about 2.7x more energy by volume than hydrogen. Diesel has 4.2x more energy. Keeping and transporting hydrogen in liquid form takes a lot of energy and requires constantly boiling it off to keep it liquid. In practice, most hydrogen is transported in compressed gas form (700 bars). In that form, you need about 11 hydrogen truckloads to a single diesel truckload.
So, it takes up a lot of space. This makes it very impractical for transport use cases. Unless you convert it to something that maybe contains hydrogen but also other atoms. Like carbon (carbohydrates) or nitrogen (e.g. ammonia). Converting it to those forms takes more energy. And those multiply. And doing the chemical conversion back to energy in a combustion engine has the same problem as all combustion engines: it loses most of the energy as heat. Fuel cells might improve on that; but they'd still be losing energy.
This is why battery electric trucks easily match the ranges of most hydrogen trucks on the road. There are currently no production hydrogen trucks or buses that offer a longer range than their battery-electric equivalents. You'd need significantly larger tanks and adding the same volume in battery would match the range easily. Even with current production batteries (160-200 wh/kg), which are about a third of the energy density of already announced new state of the art batteries (500wh/kg). Batteries are on a path of steady volumetric an mass density improvements. Hydrogen will never get better than it already is.
It's also why hydrogen planes are no longer being considered a viable plan by the likes of Airbus; most of the plane would have to be reserved for hydrogen containment.
For ships, using hydrogen as a fuel is not a serious option either. Simply too much volume. Transporting hydrogen by ship in liquid form loses 1-2% of the load per day to boil off. This is the only way to keep it liquid; boiling it off cools the liquid. The longer the journey, the more hydrogen is lost to unavoidable boil-off, making long-distance transport highly inefficient.
It's possible to imagine a future where both fuel sources have found their place, depending on context. Doesn't have to be an either/or.