It has been like that since Volta started making stacks of different metal plates and making dead frogs dance. It might surprise you to learn that making subatomic particles dance to our whim at a pace we determine isn’t very easy. We try all kinds of neat ideas to make them do this, and some of them even work. The fact that people like you see all the times we try and it doesn’t work as an indicator that we aren’t trying very hard rather than researchers trying very hard and not always being as successful as we’d like is more an indictment of you than it is of them.

Also, unlike when I started watching advances in batteries, you can find the history of rechargeable batteries with just a few minutes of web searching. If you had put in even that little bit of effort, you would know that advances in rechargeable batteries neither started nor ended with lithium.