Lithium isn't scarce relative to current demand levels but if the automotive industry wants to transition to 100% EVs that's an enormous increase in demand.
Isn't that just how markets work? They are sized to the demand today, so if you were to increase demand by 10x overnight of course they would be distorted. If however demand increases slowly over time then the markets react normally--suppliers increase production, new suppliers enter the market--and the price remains fairly stable.
That's assuming availability at quantity of base resources.
Which has generally been a fair assumption: as demand increases and price increases, exploration is incentivized and new sources are found, and capital is invested to increase production at existing / new sources.
But... there are also other ways it can go. Copper? Cobalt? Uranium-circa-1940s? Sometimes, more just isn't found.
In cases where supply is externally constrained the markets still work. The price of that component starts to go up so people search for alternatives. This is already happening in the battery market (as per TFA) and is natural.
With some more research, titanium looks like a fascinating example.
Heavy mineral sands [0] seem to be the primary source, with total heavy minerals at ~1% of weight (all mineral components).
Of that, ilmenite [1] is the primary titanium ore (reduced to sand).
So essentially, natural primary physical reduction (of hard rock to sand) is required to meet the current market price for economic viability. There exist hard rock sources, but most would be too energy intensive to exploit, given the low concentration.
The South African Tormin operation is especially fascinating, as it has ore reduced to sand AND then washed over geologic timescales by wave action, separating out less valuable minerals and concentrating the remainder (~25% THM). [2]
Which I guess is the bulk of my point: 'at any cost', there are always more resources to mine; 'at reasonable cost', there can be sharp differentiations between different types of resources (e.g. in titanium: naturally concentrated heavy mineral sands, heavy mineral sands, hard rock).
Something being widespread in the Earth's crust, but at less than 1% concentration, doesn't help us a lot if we need civilization-scale quantities of it.
Or, if copper were distributed like that, we'd probably all use aluminum wiring.