Man the reporting on this ordeal has been so awful and so representative of how media misleads the public into thinking things are worse than they actually are.
It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications to account for the extra crew left on the station, and those crew are 'stuck' only in the sense that they're expected to stay there as part of their duties and it would be unnecessarily disruptive to operations to bring them back early. Starliner was still deemed to be safe enough to be the emergency escape option while it was docked, then the emergency escape option became seats setup in the cargo portion of the Crew-8 capsule.
It isn't a rescue mission, it's a regular crew rotation mission with modifications to account for the extra crew left on the station, and those crew are 'stuck' only in the sense that they're expected to stay there as part of their duties and it would be unnecessarily disruptive to operations to bring them back early. Starliner was still deemed to be safe enough to be the emergency escape option while it was docked, then the emergency escape option became seats setup in the cargo portion of the Crew-8 capsule.