There are a huge number of myths. Grid is not really my expertise, not at all, but I hear this a lot, it's challenging to get a reliable grid. At the same time I read an interview with the CEO of 50Hertz [1], one of Germany's grid operators who says, we can do 70-80% renewables easy and managed the solar eclipse a lot easier than even we thought. And data backs it up, Germany has one of the more reliable grids in the world. It makes sense even on a layman level - why would it be less of a challenge to have a grid with a few large plants? One of those goes offline unexpectedly and you lose a significant percentage of your capacity. This never happens with renewables and their intermittency is easily handled with a weather forecast.
It is certainly possible, just more expensive. And I'm just saying that one shouldn't mix cost of production and price for the consumer.
It is easier to size the network when the current flows basically in one single direction from power plant to users. When the production is decentralised, you need more transmission lines. You also get more losses in the transmission if you go through more substations.
Big turbines helps to keep a stable frequency on the network despite unpredictable consumption changes. With renewables one need to adjust the frequency. One also need to keep the power factor in track. All of this means extra costly hardware on the grid and extra loss.
I am a big fan of residential solar, but objectively I don't think it's a big story outside of Europe. In the US it's dwarfed by utility scale installations, which are then also one way only. The grid cost issue specific to the US, the way I understood it, is that proposed additions to the grid go through an interconnection queue and get slapped with the costs for grid upgrades if their project is approved and they are the first in that area. And that this is less of a cost for a large plant that anyway has more choice where to place it, and more of an issue for a much smaller renewables installation where the location is less flexible and the combination of smaller capacity and grid costs might make the project not feasible. The opponents of solar or renewables in general then like to say that these integration costs are high for renewables, but actually it's more of a regulatory issue and you could do things differently and share the costs among several projects in the same area. Here is a good podcast with a transcript on the issues: https://www.volts.wtf/p/whats-the-deal-with-interconnection
There's also the case that rooftop solar preferably gets used locally and not fed in to the grid. So there you actually remove a lot of inefficiencies and costs because in the case of rooftop solar being consumed locally, there is nothing to transmit in the grid in either direction. So overall, my layman view of the situation is that the high grid costs are an overblown issue, especially because you would need to upgrade the grid anyway if everyone charged their car and electricity came from large plants only.
[1] https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy/interview/german-ele...