The Starship in non-reusable stage didn't get to orbit purely to avoid problems with deorbiting, should they happen. Energiya rocket, a Saturn-V class launcher

The Starship in non-reusable stage didn't get to orbit purely to avoid problems with deorbiting, should they happen. Energiya rocket, a Saturn-V class launcher which flew twice in 1980-s, deliberately was not getting to orbital speed, for the same reason - don't need to pollute the orbit in the case deorbiting burn fails. Starship has a disadvantage that it's not that easy to release the payload, so Starship has first to get to full orbit, and then take time to release the payload, and then deorbit, and we can have problems there with what to do with Starship which malfunctioned on the deorbiting stage. However to just get to orbit Starship needs to work a few seconds longer than it did already several times - a rather small change. So it's not quite accurate to accuse them "they didn't get the easy part of getting to orbit done".