The raw materials are certainly valuable enough to be worth recycling, assuming it's not terribly hard to separate them back out from each other.

But suppose we never figure out a good way to recycle these batteries, and we just have to throw them all in a landfill and keep making new ones. Is that actually so terrible? There's nothing toxic in a typical li-ion battery, so basically we just have inert materials that were taken from the ground being put back in the ground. Mining for nickel/cobalt/lithium is not great for the environment, but the effect is pretty localized, so a "disposable battery future" is probably still highly preferable over the fossil fuel status quo where the entire planet is fucked.