Agreed. Specialized only in that they are much rarer than, say, iron or aluminum. Sloppy reporting.
The way the science community uses the term ‘rare’ with these elements is misleading to most. It’s not like baseball cards, with common, uncommon, and ‘rare’. It’s not like that.
Rare in this instance pertains to the difficulty of extraction. A ‘rare earth element’ is much harder to extract, therefore much more expensive to obtain. I don’t think it means there is a shortfall.