You're missing the most important part. The electric grid is a universal power adapter. The grid will adopt whatever power source is most economical/environmental. Until mass adoption happens the economy is inextricably linked to all sorts of countries and people we don't want controlling us. Furthermore, all natural resource will slowly increase in cost as we extract more. Moving to electric vehicles allows us to take advantage of a basket of all sources of energy. As nuclear fusion (or other currently unknown tech) rolls in cost of transportation may actually reduce. Its a long path but important to work on now so we are ready for the future when it gets here.

Continuously killing the gators most attracted to baby wailing for a few decades could decrease the overall gator population attraction to eating babies in distress. That's a win-win in my book.

You are missing a few key things...

1) Cheap enough for personal use in small quantities is NOT the same as cheap on an industrial level. A Buckyball toy has ounces of magnet, a wind turbine will have hundreds of pounds, which brings us to point 2

2) Renewables and electric vehicle usage is steadily increasing every year. So the usage of rare earth magnets will continue to balloon over the next decade or so. Which brings us to the most critical point in all of this.

3) Geo Politics. The majority of rare earth magnet sources are in China, which has already implemented some forms of export restrictions.

So an analogue is the oil market before OPEC started really throttling things. Given that the materials that make these magnets are relatively common it is something that can be solved with Science! This is cool news and shows government serving a purpose (funding strategic research) that businesses would not be looking at until after billions of $ were being unnecessarily spent on artificial scarcity.

There will be hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the reconstruction of Ukraine for decades. Simply make a way to earmark the funds used to pay for the process and add a note saying that Ukraine can boycott equipment or supplies from any country that supports Russia during this time. Without explicitly saying "China, stop supporting Russia", it would be clear how many carrots are to be had and also how short sighted it is to support Russia right now. The less countries support Russia the quicker this ends. My gut feeling is that after the glut of oil money that is going to be made this winter both Putin and the Russian attack will disappear.