I’m afraid I cannot access the article, so I can’t talk to the nuances. But FWIW, I recall a study from the 90s that suggested electric cars would cause more environmental destruction than they’d save because of lead pollution.
The authors had a point — recent work on the lead-crime link have shown that scaling lead batteries could have been a catastrophic environmental disaster. But the authors were wrong of course in another very important way — technology is not static. By the time batteries scaled, another technology had surpassed lead. So we are left with a cobalt problem instead.
There are no perfect solutions. But all of us — myself very much included — should use care in making our extrapolations. Technology is not static, and none can be expected to last forever. Not even oil.