Recycling was actively brought forward as a solution by the oil companies to push the blame of plastic use onto consumers.
So while recycling rare metals is always valuable, plastic is definitely not. Almost all plastic gets buried in landfills, and the only way to make this not happen is to not make products with plastics.
By creating and marketing plastic recycling as a solution that the consumers must take onto themselves, it allowed them to rake in profits by moving everything to cheap plastic alternatives.
We are now literally made of microplastics as a result.