The Nickel and Cobalt parts have been declining for decades and are low percentages of *-ode material, especially in cars which are no volume constrained. Only smartphone batteries or similar appliances have high amounts of those. In fact there some EVs which have less cobalt then normal cars because cobalt steel is used in many parts of the motor and transmission.
This is why something like Li-S is the holy grail of batteries.
I would rather see Li-S be used in planes where inspections are common unlike cars.
For grid storage neither is ideal, as you really want to decouple (dis)charging from capacity. Subterranean normal pressure hydrogen storage (using geological structures like salt caves) or flow batteries seem more promising for that reason.
Having a hydrogen economy is overall pretty inefficient. I think it's largely a dead end. We do not need multi-year energy storage. Seasonal storage is needed at most. Lithium-ion batteries have self-discharge rates of around 2% per month. Even if the batteries lose ~10% over a few months that's an acceptable loss and is superior to the inefficiencies inherent in hydrogen production via electrolysis and the subsequent use of stored hydrogen via fuel-cells — which require platinum-group metals.
To mix it with renewables, you need at least some reasonably fast capacity. How much of the gas generation capacity is baseload capacity that could be replaced with nuclear?