Those people aren't mature enough to be out in society. Seriously, humans need dog-like socialization classes to learn how to behave around other humans.
I’m sorry that happened, but I hope you stuck with the healthy thing you were doing because its good for you, and didn’t let some assholes get in your head.
The nice thing about batteries is that they can be recycled almost entirely in a closed loop cycle, so eventually we’ll reach a place where new batteries aren't mined at all, but recycled from old
Idk how far into that we are currently, however there are recycling facilities kinda all over especially for ev batteries. They can also be reused for a while for other things, like home energy storage (like in place of a whole-house generator for blackouts if you are grid-tied, or solar storage for off-grid)