Discussions about baseload are meaningless unless you can articulate how much of it we're talking about (in gw, gwh, and $). Most discussions about this topic completely skip over that.

Technically, what grids mostly need now that we have a lot of intermittent producers and consumers of energy is not a lot of very inflexible generation (which is what baseload boils down to) but a lot of flexibility in the grid that can be switched on/off and is able to rapidly adapt to changing supply and demand.

The grid doesn't need gas plants that are running 24x7 and burn a lot of expensive gas when there's more than enough power being generated through the day from wind and solar, which tends to be a lot cheaper.

But because that's intermittent, you still need other sources of power. The traditional interpretation of that is "baseload" i.e. the stuff that used to provide most of our power (coal, nuclear, and gas).

But in the last few years we have a new alternative: batteries. This grew from next to nothing a few years ago to hundreds of GW of capacity. Soon TWs. Batteries can smooth out the peaks and dips and switch from charging to discharging in a few milliseconds. You might still need some other power beyond that but now you can carefully plan when to bring backup power online and take it offline again once it is no longer needed.

Modern gas plants can switch on and off relatively quickly and are very suitable for providing tha backup power. Modern coal and nuclear plants can do that as well but are just a lot less attractive due to their higher cost. And if you are not utilizing backup plants most of the time, their cost is really important.

Power that is 1) very expensive, and 2) can't be switched off easily or cheaply, is kind of a the opposite of what is needed. That's what baseload amounts to. It's the exact opposite of what is needed.

A thing that's often overlooked in discussions like this is cables. Cables can move power around. And interconnected grids like the European or Chinese grids make use of that to deal with highly localized peaks and dips in energy due to weather and daily and seasonal changes in availability of e.g. sunlight. An east west cable can time shift power in early morning and late evening. A north south cable can move solar power from places close to the equator to places further away from it. There are some cable projects being planned to connect Africa to Europe, Australia to Singapore, and Canada to Europe. Cables + batteries deflate a lot of the economical argument for needing baseload.