I never claimed they are going back to ICE, but Toyota claimed that they had an ICE engine that would make EV obsolete a couple of years ago when Toyota didn’t have any Electric cars only hybrid.
And no they did not start with EV before hydrogen, all Japanese car makers bet a lot on Hydrogen because it was supported by their government. This is the reason all Japanese car makers except Nissan are late to the EV market.

Toyota has made false claims about having amazing batteries before too, seemingly in an attempt to make people wait to buy a new car until Toyota was more competitive. These kinds of vaporware announcements are borderline fraud IMO.