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Its definitely a cool option where practical, but batteries will fit almost anywhere and take a tiny amount of space compared to this. Where its practical though its a cool option.
Most substation could pretty easily hold a large battery and you could plop a handful down on any empty lot anywhere in a city and have megawatt hour level storage.
The downside of the pumped is it doesn't provide instant grid balancing like a battery would as its a much slower option.
Also you have to maintain the pump and the mechanism that let's the water out when needed, its not quite as low maintenance as you think, and the whole mechanism itself needs power. It probably needs a gas/battery backup to open the gates in a power outage to generate power for the outage.
My thought along the lines of "where practical" is that it can be used as a reservoir for fresh water as an added function, especially in high elevation areas or renote rural areas where having direct mains pressure water isn't viable.
In the event of a true grid level power outage it would require staff to physically open pump valves, the same way a regular hydroelectric power station or potable water pumping station would, I wasn't thinking of the system being entirely automated.
It's not an infallible system, absolutely. The same way battery storage isn't a perfect solutuon. This is just a more stable and reliable source of power than battery storage, which degrades in the course of around 5 years in the case of batteries like LiFePo4 or other Lithium ions.
A water pumping or hydroelectric station which can survive for multiple decades with regular maintenance, using already existing technology and infrastructure (there are a lot of companies that produce very robust pumps for the petrochemical industry that wouldn't lose out on too many contracts if they supported the idea, and in a lot of places where it makes economic sense to build, there's already water infrastructure that could handle if not benefit from additional water storage, not even mentioning the potential for more semi skilled jobs keeping the sites operational. )
You're a little off on your 5 year for battery, its more like 15-20 years for grid scale LFP batteries and they still have ~80% power after that.
If they can find spots by existing water reservoirs that does seem like an ideal location.
Edit: Also newer Sodium based batteries are even better than that, but they do take more space than LFP. They might exceed 10,000 cycles which could be 25-30 years and the tech is very early.