Metals, even abundant ones, are not infinite resources and recycle scrap metal tend to be much less energivore than mining new one, so aluminum per se it can be recycled ad infinitum, with just energy, like glass. They are VERY GOOD materials because of that. Oh, sure in practice it's not that easy because we almost never use pure aluminum, pure glass, but as long as the extra elements are very marginal and/or easy to separate there are not much issues. They can be called circular.
Steel so far it's not because to make new steel out of scrap metal we need coke, there are various experiments to recover steel only adding energy but so far nothing on scale so while recyclable formally (and VERY recycled) it's not circular.
Due to volumes and natural resource limits anything we can do ad infinitum is a godsend because we know if we are able to produce and recycle enough we will never be short of it. That's why it's definitively a general priority. We have started to understand that anything we do on scale we also must count how to dispose of it and how much resources we consume in the process, the era of abundance enough not to care is largely ended and the outcome is hard enough to learn the lesson.
Yes, aluminum is abundant, BUT we already have witnessed scarcity issues in the supply chain, mostly due to poor diversification combined with geopolitical issues, but anyway scarcity. Since smelting and scrapping aluminum it's roughly easy recyclability is important because it can be "domestic" easily, like the one of glass.
Try to see the big picture, not the detail, meaning the complexity of current state of things and the fragility such complexity imply in a world heating toward a III worlds war.
Aluminum is 8% of the Earth's continental crust by mass. We are not going to run out of it. Recycling it is for saving energy, not conserving aluminum.
Steel so far it's not because to make new steel out of scrap metal we need coke, there are various experiments to recover steel only adding energy but so far nothing on scale so while recyclable formally (and VERY recycled) it's not circular.
Due to volumes and natural resource limits anything we can do ad infinitum is a godsend because we know if we are able to produce and recycle enough we will never be short of it. That's why it's definitively a general priority. We have started to understand that anything we do on scale we also must count how to dispose of it and how much resources we consume in the process, the era of abundance enough not to care is largely ended and the outcome is hard enough to learn the lesson.