Hydrogen needs to be in a static-free envelope. With balloons, there is some weight penalty for this due to different materials. You still get more lift than with helium but not as much as is theoretically possible.
The real benefit of hydrogen over helium as a lift gas is that it’s a lot cheaper. Helium is precious in a way very few other substances on Earth are: Not only is there a very small amount of it, but if it’s lost, it’s completely irretrievable and irreplaceable. Even fossil fuels, say, could be replaced if we had some other source of energy to use for the process (plus the raw materials, but those are abundant), but you can’t just make more helium.
The earth’s atmosphere contains some, about 5 ppm. Though this article says extracting helium from air would cost 10,000 times more than what helium costs now.
We could mine Jupiter for it, but I suspect that might be even more expensive.
I think something like that could work for aircraft manufacturing, Airbus in particular. Every time they have to move very large components from one factory to another its a major logistics operation.
