I mean, if you have have gigawatts of base load online inside of 5 years, that sounds like a good model to me. We're more than 5 years away from viable gridscale batteries for the sole reason that you have to manufacture them and currently we aren't even close to having enough capacity to do so. Current deployments of batteries are like 80% efficient, and they're not designed to run indefinitely, usually only being used for peak loads, and really never more than 4 hours at a time. If you have 12+ hours of darkness, well, you're going to need alot more batteries than you think.

Also, Springbok is in a highly ideal site in the western mojave, and it's capacity factor is only 31%, so, it's not really generating it's nameplate power very often. It's also 1400acres of land used, which isn't trivial. Granted it's mostly worthless desert land in this case, that won't be the case everywhere. Sure the up-front cost/mwh of PV is much lower than nuclear ($40/MWh vs $82/MWh), you also need 12+ hours worth of batteries, which can easily place your total costs at roughly double what nuclear is, which is why you see exactly zero installations operating like that. In your scenario with no base load but batteries, they'd have to. Batteries also piss away roughly 20% of the energy you put into them, so, you need 20% higher capacity and 20% more generation.

It seems that nuclear is mostly curtailed by regulation. That's somewhat a scale problem because every plant is bespoke, were they standardized, there would likely be less need for regulation. That drives costs and lead times down significantly. Realistically, nuclear is $6/MWh, which is very, very cheap, comparable to pure PV, less than PV with batteries, the problem is building the plant which is incredibly expensive, and, with a high degree of uncertainty as to how expensive exactly. You could very well build a plant, and then have to rebuild it because some regulator found something they didn't like that was inherent to your design (that they'd looked at for years by that point). That's a thing that's actually happened.

What you need to remember is that the basic numbers you're given for things are often wrong for the things they appear to be useful for. Most of what gets quoted are hybridized numbers that attempt to account for a variety of externalities. When you look into what those externalities are, you'll find that they're accounting for costs that are a big deal in a small set of unusual circumstances, and failing to account for things that are a big deal in a large set of common circumstances. The body politic et al has substantial influence on this, as do corporate interests. Once you filter through all of that, you more or less arrive at the conclusion I've come to. Nuclear base load of at least 50%, PV/wind for the rest (mostly PV), build 4 hours of battery capacity, and your grid's stable and cheap for the foreseeable future. Whenever fusion power gets cheap, you can probably move to that, which at this rate will probably be around the time the reactors are reaching EOL given that we out and out refuse to fund it. (15.6B for renewables, 763M for fusion most of which is slated for ICF with no plans to generate power).