advances in technology are likely to mean more cities will follow Moscow, not Prague.
I was wondering when someone would bring up Moscow. The removal of trolleybuses in Moscow was soundly derided by almost all transport experts and was driven almost exclusively by the mayor's personal dislike for overhead wires and desire to sell off the trolleybus depots to his friends for development.
The trolleybus lines were nominally replaced with opportunity charging buses, but in reality the vast majority were initially replaced with diesel buses, and those that weren't used buses with diesel heating as the batteries weren't powerful enough to heat them during winter (said heaters do not conform to any emissions regulations so were far more dirty than diesel buses for half the year).
The new electric buses cost 30% more than an equivalent new trolleybus, and
twice as many e-buses were required to replace the trolleybuses on a given line. They spend 30% of their time standing at termini charging, and they are not allowed to be left unattended during this time, so driver utilisation fell significantly. Reliability of the new buses continues to be terrible. Said chargers take up an inordinate amount of space as well, and there are simply not enough of them for the frequencies that should be running and were running before.
Lower driver utilisation means service frequencies on the entire bus network have fallen considerably since the trolleybuses were removed, and even now, several years later, there are fewer electric buses in service than there were trolleybuses. Advances in technology do not change the laws of physics.
Meanwhile, St. Petersburg took the sensible route and has started augmenting its trolleybus network with IMC trolleybuses, to increase the number of buses running electrically without requiring any new infrastructure and reduce the number of diesel buses. Had Moscow done the same, and also installed some opportunity chargers where appropriate,
all diesel buses could have been removed from the entire city
by now, at no extra cost, just by replacing diesel buses at the end of their life with either IMC (in-motion charging) trolleybuses or e-buses as appropriate, instead of replacing the trolleybuses with e-buses.
In other words, following Moscow would be the last thing any competent mayor of a city would do. Moscow had the perfect infrastructure to electrify everything easily, and squandered it completely. I suspect we will see trolleybuses in Moscow again sooner or later.