No, that doesn't seem likely to me at all. Lithium prices are high because the industry is not very well developed and the demand is skyrocketing. Borax is co-located with lithium deposits (in some places) and is extracted by a similar process at similar scales and it costs 100x less than lithium. And for some reason nobody looks at the gigantic land scar at a borax mine and starts screaming about the environmental cost, because there's no oil billionaire astroturf fund dedicated to whining about boron.

Open pit mines are huge and the biggest ones are for boring things like iron and copper: https://www.mpirecruitment.au/news/the-worlds-deepest-bigges...