.. steel cables, cogs and pulleys wear out after some time especially under heavy loads coming from those concrete blocks.
Everything wears out.
Heck, some battery storage grid balancers catch fire before they are even commisioned
What is the long term cost of batteries at grid scale?...we don't know yet. Ask in 20 years.
I like the solutions that use basic principles and engineering, easy to build, predicatable installation and maintenance costs with minimal rare earth materials.
This also enables cost-effective solutions for less developed countries which they can implement themselves, so they don't have to depend on foreign technologies.
Pumped hydro is a great solution when you have the geology, although I don't know how efficiency compares to other options.
Molten metal batteries sounded interesting but seems to have gone nowhere since 2014