Moore's Law was primarily a tool for arguing with finance guys to let you borrow the enormous amount of money to build the new fab- see, this law says that if you don't let us raise the money, then the other company will- see this straight line? It's inevitable, so give us the money.

We could have chosen that scale of investment in battery technology, certainly, but the finance guys said that it wasn't profitable to invest that much in it. China was willing to invest into this field for national security reasons (the threat was of the USN cutting off oil traffic in the Indian Ocean, well beyond the range of the Chinese military). Semiconductors themselves were the result of (US) national security investment- the Minuteman ICBM guidance system was the first large scale use of IC semiconductors.

Given how quickly battery technology has advanced- and how profitable it has been to build these factories- I think the evidence is that the finance guys were wrong about the profitability and importance of battery research/construction, and the national security investment jump-started the whole thing, just like with semiconductors.