[marsokod]

The main reason this is looked at is that, while you are right in saying these materials resources are well distributed, China has been a major supplier for decades, buying out all their big competitors. The result is that they are way ahead of anyone else in the engineering processes to extract, process and transform these elements into viable products at scale.

If China were to stop selling them, everyone else would have a lot of difficulties replacing them right away and would need at least 5-10 years to pick up the pace.