To be fair, their concern about having so few payloads that they wouldn't be building enough boosters isn't completely wrong for Europe. There is some merit to

To be fair, their concern about having so few payloads that they wouldn't be building enough boosters isn't completely wrong for Europe. There is some merit to the idea that they needed to maintain a large workforce trained in rocketry to hold onto their capabilities and that government funded programs are good for that until private industry firmly takes hold. The issue of course was that they were giving into stagnation and assuming that demand wouldn't grow to meet supply, while SpaceX took it the other way and came up with the demand to utilize the supply they had created (also helps that Russia torpedoed its own commercial launch industry and all other providers are stuck in a delayed generational transition, highlighting the unpredictability of demand in the industry). Now that European launch companies are starting to make progress, perhaps this need for government 'protection' will also go away. It desperately needs to go away in the US since we already have several private companies who've made it to orbit (plus a nearly 20 year tech lead on the rest of the world courtesy SpaceX) and hopefully SLS's obsolete-ness will quickly become too hard to ignore when the Artemis 3 crew is shown transferring from the cramped Orion capsule to the spacious HLS.