Most freight should still go by sea and rail. There’s no beating those modes especially if the railways get fully electrified and container ships transition to nuclear power. The case for long distance point-to-point transport of large, special equipment is still there, but I don’t think it really changes the world. Rather, the substantial, practical benefit of airships is moving people more humanely and with lower greenhouse gas emissions. Video conferencing and telepresence is good enough these days that there isn’t a good reason anymore for people to cross oceans in a matter of hours except in an emergency. Eventually, emissions costs will stop being externalized and at that point airships could fill the fast-enough/cheap use case.

I don’t understand what you mean about crosswinds being a problem. Increasing the lifting capacity of an airship only increases the effect of crosswind relatively modestly. That’s because a given increase in the relevant cross sectional area of an airship roughly corresponds to a square increase of the volume, which directly correlates to lifting capacity. To think of it another way, any crosswind penalty to increasing the lifting capacity of an airship can be negated by allocating some of that additional capacity to increasing the available thrust of the propulsion system. Therefore, crosswinds become less of a problem for airships as they get bigger.

There are already robust standards in place for working with hydrogen and as of 2022, the EU has adapted their regulations to allow for hydrogen as a lifting gas. It is still prohibited in North America, but the FAA is already giving initial approval for hydrogen fueled airplanes, which of course requires high pressure hydrogen fuel tanks, an arguably riskier proposition than ambient pressure gas cells. Anyway, it seems like one way or another, hydrogen is the future of flight.