Well, in this page a member shows that copper is used three time as much as cobalt in car batteries, and only a few days ago a documentary emerged about the copper extraction industry in Chile as a barricaded enclave causing high human costs.

And even more recently the moves in the geopolitical game made the extraction of rare earths and its environmental (and social, etc.) costs a renewedly current topic.

I am not sure that cobalt has a specially bad place in the whole context of extraction. (Apart from the non irrelevant fact that 'cobalt' comes from "kobold", because its ore is toxic.)