It is a new phenomenon when the the thing that goes extinct is critical infrastructure (e.g., pollinators). We've seen similar things with the great potato famine: a critical resource went (temporarily) extinct due to blight, and the results were catastrophic. The paper is trying to make the same statement with minerals, but at a global scale, not just referring to the poor in one country in the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)

map of population death toll:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)#/media/...