People seem to confuse the cost of something new with the harm in throwing it away -- they get upset about $250 AirPods not getting recycled, while they don't give a second thought to throwing away a couple pairs of $1 AAA batteries, when it's about the same level of landfill impact.
Or in this case, they think there's something wrong with throwing away a 5 oz (140 g) cell phone, but don't feel particularly bad when they finally dispose of an old 50 lb (22 kg) air conditioner -- or a 3,000 lb (1,360 kg) car. (Using these numbers, one car is the same mass of material as almost 10,000 phones.)
Putting it into perspective, cell phones are nothing. There's more glass used to make a jar of peanut butter, and you throw away more plastic after a family-sized Chinese takeout meal.
And yes if there are precious metals inside that can be recovered, then let's recover those -- but only if it's economical. Because that's a pure question of economics. We don't need to be "virtuous" -- if markets really think the metal is going to be that valuable because we're going to run out, then they will pay you accordingly handsomely for your old broken phones. But it doesn't seem like we've reached that point yet, because nobody's paying anything.