Keep in mind that the traditional car companies make higher profit on their gas architectures, so it's in their best interest to slow the transition to EVs, and give you this perception. They're spinning a high interest rate driven slowdown in car sales as a shift away from EVs - but it's a slowdown in sales overall that impacts gas vehicles as well.
It looks to me like in much of the US, a Prius is currently more expensive to buy or lease (including incentives) than a Tesla 3 or a Hyundai Kona EV - and cheaper to operate and maintain, especially in states like Washington that both have cheap electricity and carbon pricing. I suspect much of the operations cost difference is eaten by higher insurance costs in much of the US, though.
A lot of the legacy manufacturers are still producing cars that are essentially their old architectures with EV tech, which is expensive to manufacture. Some are releasing vehicles built on an EV-first architecture in the next year, reducing costs, so you're going to see continued competition on price.
On top of that, new EVs may last longer than gas vehicles. EV batteries increasingly last 300,000+ miles, and hold their capacity better over that time with each new chemistry.
Two years ago I thought people were crazy to buy an EV, charging infrastructure was a mess, technology didn't seem mature. But at this point unless you're trying to drive to the Yukon in your daily driver, it's a bit crazy to buy something as complex as a gas vehicle.
Really depends on how batteries develop, in my opinion. If we see a jump in energy density and charging speeds that allows e.g. a VW Golf sized car to have a range of 400-500 miles (with larger vehicles with larger batteries being able to go even further), the appeal of hybrids diminishes significantly. That’s a good enough range to close remaining gaps in the NA charger grid and longer than many ICE cars can go without a refill.
I think plug-in hybrids are the current sweet spot for people who can charge at home (or maybe at work). The results in this article are impressive, but cross-country trips across America aren't very representative of the kinds of driving people actually do. Most trips, especially daily commuting, are short enough that a plug-in hybrid could do the entire trip on battery power and then you have the gas engine for longer distance trips where it behaves like a regular hybrid.
All-electric cars are getting closer, but the long distance driving experience just isn't as good yet as driving a gas car. But that will continue to improve and electric cars have a lot of other advantages like simplicity, so I'm fairly confident they'll win out eventually. But as you said, for at least the next decade hybrid cars occupy a pretty good niche.
