I thought it was fakenews because I had no idea Boeing built something that actually travels into space

The dirty little secret of the US space program is that absolutely everything that's flown to orbit under NASA ownership has been manufactured by a for-profit company. NASA does not, and never has, built orbital rockets in-house. Not a single one. The US senate keeps an iron grip on NASA's pursestrings, and they've used NASA as a glorified slush fund to top up defence contractor coffers.

Over the decades there's been a lot of consolidation of the aerospace industry. Boeing now owns what's left of the companies that built every single spacecraft that's launched humans to space from US soil, except for SpaceX's Crew Dragon. The X-15 rocket plane (which is amazing piece of engineering that deserves its own effortpost), Mercury, Gemini, the Apollo CSM, the Space Shuttle, and now Starliner. They also own what's left of a whole lot of orbital rocket manufacturers. Of course there's little-to-no engineering DNA in Starliner from those prior programs - I was just using them as examples of prior commercialization of space.

All that's really changed in the "new commercial space race" is that private companies are now doing design work in addition to construction, and NASA can now do fixed-price contracts instead of the expense-bloating "cost-plus" contracts. Most of the loudest voices in US politics whining about the "commercialization of space" are quietly getting a lot of campaign funding from the old defence contractors who are pissed that fixed-price contracts are becoming the norm. Boeing has lost literally billions of dollars on the Starliner program because of their own constant screwups that they can't just send NASA an invoice for like they used to be able to do. It's one of those new style of fixed-price contracts that's now saving NASA's financial bacon. All these delays and re-tests are entirely at Boeing's expense.