you don't need much storage, just enough to transition to generation (~20 min). This can be done with dumb shit like flywheels, capacitors, falling weights, thermal, or liquidified air... Ect..

Really not that simple. For average house you need 3-5kW, so for 20 min you need 1kWh, or, say 2 car batteries. But you use that storage rarely, and batteries dies within few years even on floating charge. All that lithium crap is overpriced as fuck. But you need readily availabe energy even after a year of idling. And other variants of ready-to-use storage are highly ineffective. You need tons of water at 10 meters, or find out a way to use a weight of whole house to store that 1kW. I didn't find any simple, reliable and long-lasting way to store electricity in decent amounts. Either it is unreliable as car batteries, or overpriced, or overcomplicated, or all of them like lithium batteries or extracting and pressurising CO2.

Backup gen should be dumb shit too

Regular gasoline generators are OK. Relatively cheap, powerful, affordable spare parts and so on. Really, you could run them on nearly anything flammabe, gas, LPG, methane, alcohol, whatever. Diesel could run on oil-alcohol mix, but they are not the best thing to start at winter. But they need some love and care to be ready-to-go.

But there's really no place for nuclear.

Will gladly bury RITEG on backyard and forget about any energy problems for 30-50 years. Really it will work much longer, for centuries, but with lower output.