Yeah it's a bit confusing. They are rare in terms of the percentage of the earth's crust that is made up of those elements, but they are found in most areas of the world evenly distributed. You just have to sift through massive quantities of ordinary earth and you find them. That's the problem, making an industry of such scale that processing through huge amounts of earth is profitable requires a lot of build-up and investment and supply lines.

And by "sift" I mean, an extremely long and complex process of chemical regimes to extract specific elements. It's very complicated. There's like 70 "rare earths" that all require different processes.