Comment by pfdietz

Of course it's true for batteries. There's a huge number of potential battery types, most of which never make it out of the lab, never mind to market. Most on your list there are in are in tiny niches.

To steelman the point you're making: perhaps the short term storage niche will fracture into smaller niches, in which different technologies could coexist. This also happens in ecology. For example, in one simple experiment with bacteria, it was found two species coexisted, but on closer examination it was found one species persisted in the top of the flasks, the other in the bottom.