Recycling may very well become economically feasible once we start generating millions of tons of solar panel residue, large scale operation is a huge aspect of profitability

Scale is irrelevant. The cost to break down and recover materials from a solar panel and then recycle it to be able to make it into a new panel is higher than it costs to just buy a new panel, and this is never going to change - especially as the price of cheap chinese-made solar panels keeps decreasing.