Unfortunately, no. It's not. However, there is some nuance here. Even though their approach is more polluting, it allows infrastructure down the line such as modern cars to be upgraded to use hydrogen.

The hydrogen factory can then later be replaced by a non-polluting one. Much like how a lot of places switched to electricity while the power was being generated by natural gas. Some places moved to using nuclear later, and poof, carbon neutral.

In the end a transition is easier to divvy up progress with small architecture changes, not small bits of absolute carbon emissions / pollution