I'm not keeping track, but some of the things we ran out of include sand, helium, tellurium, tantalum, niobium, bees...
This dismissive contrarian Pollyanna attitude might serve well to minimise your personal anxiety, but I would argue that it is pretty bad way to make decisions or manage risk.
This is not some article saying that the sky is falling without evidence. It is not even an article saying the sky is falling with evidence. It is an article that says that there is a significant risk, due to an entirely preventable man-made problem, where steps can be taken now to reduce the medium-term impact of the problem. And then it lists those steps. Why is this not OK to you?
The main reason being: materials are cheap - plant time is what's expensive.
First, raw materials are such a small fraction of chip costs that even if the market price of a given material spikes up two orders of magnitude briefly, the market can eat the spike. For many broadly used materials, this alone is "end of story" - the majority of consumers will balk at the price and exit the market long before semiconductors supply chains will. And second, between the costs of halting production and the low volumes of actual materials involved, supply buffers exist on sites. That plays against supply chain fragility.
It's one thing to have everything JITted within an inch of its life on a razor thin margins car plant. It's another matter entirely to have a "potential supply disruption" in semiconductor manufacturing that will, if all supply truly and fully stopped tomorrow, convert to actual stopped plants in 4 months unless something is done about it in the meanwhile. And that "unless something is done" bites hard when you have a lot of engineering capability underlined by general price insensitivity. As semiconductor industry does.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/03/11/ukraine_neon_supplies...
Despots will keep pushing their limits until they get punched in the nose, and so far the only limits they've hit have been a few angry parades.
I really don't understand the motivation, as British Petroleum (BP) was not a direct U.S. interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
That's why biological systems look so wasteful (chlorophyll reflecting the more abundant wavelength, etc.)
Everything from Peak Oil to today has the globalized market/trade machine meeting the needs continuously with only leaf nodes for products being the constraint. Almost all inputs have been commoditized.
If you're referring to Spruce Pine in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene [0, 1], the predictions that chipmaking would be severely disrupted turned out to not come true because the Spruce Pine mine sustained a lot less damage than initially feared and was made operational within a week or two [2], not because high-purity quartz is commoditized.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2024/09/30/nx-s1-5133462/hurricane-helen...
[1] https://www.aveva.com/en/our-industrial-life/type/article/hu...
[2] https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/spruce-pine-q...