Can't comment on the first one.

The guardian article says that Germany reactivated coal plants to act as an emergency if the gas would not be enough. It's important to known that gas is not primarly used to make electricity, gas plants are only used when there are peaks in consumption that can not be fulfilled by any other means. Reactivating plants as an emergency backup is not the same as investing in coal power. I am not clear on whether they were even necessary, afaik the gas reserves never went into a critically low level.

Lüzerath is a whole other story. That deal had been made long ago, RWE agreed to stop mining coal earlier if they were allowed to mine the area with that village on top of it. It became a symbol, and people claimed the coal was necessary to maintain stability in the electricity network. Which was proven wrong it was mostly sold to other countries to be burned in their plants.

For all our faults Germany is steadily leaving both fossile and nuclear power behind.

Ok, so where are the energy storages currently being built? This is not exactly a problem that's cheap or trivial to solve.

You mean just like nuclear plants are very expensive and non-trivial to build?