SLS can get about 27 tons to the moon, Falcon Heavy about 20 tons. Sure, redesigning the plans to handle splitting between two launches is time and money, but two falcon heavies is only ~$300M base price. SLS is a waste even without starship.

Yeah but Falcon Heavy is a proven platform. It can lift almost as much as SLS at a tiny fraction of the price. We could've done something like Artemis 1 with at most a few Falcon Heavy launches years ago for pennies on the dollar, right?

Artemis already depends on Starship. So if Starship fails, Artemis fails.

Not accurate - NASA will ask someone else to build the lunar lander under LETS contract. Starship HLS is a complex system which requires half a dozen launches, a simpler lander with lower payload capacity has an higher chance of being realized.

Not when the alternate lander options don’t even have enough performance to land and take off the moon if the astronauts mass is included.

The lower payload requirements mean Starship HLS requires fewer fuel replenishment launches, so an apples to apples comparison makes Starship slightly less risky, especially as the other landers rely on launchers far less developed than Starship.

Those other landers are pure fantasy as of right now and are not remotely financed at all.

If anything so far its a purely political move so NASA can tell congress 'sure we do sort of still pretend to have multiple landers'.