If a piece of military hardware or software fails, one or two or a dozen people die... if they can't eject.

If a piece of civilian hardware or software fails, hundreds of people die. Witness the 737 Max.

The breakdown of the barrier between the military and commercial sides of Boeing has resulted in a catastrophic reduction in quality on the civilian side. So overcharging for soap dispensers on the military side is far more egregious than overcharging for them on the civilian side, because the stakes are actually lower.

I'd actually disagree there. The stakes for military aircraft are higher - assume Russia or China sends a nuclear bomb equipped squad on their merry way to Alaska.

If even one of the US planes has an issue taking it out of the fight, the Russian bomber squad may succeed, dropping a nuke and killing tens of thousands of people.

"Whoops sometimes our windows fall off mid flight but trust me bro, this soap dispenser is a fucking disaster waiting to happen"

Occam's razor says this is corruption.

The very second you start making an exception because "a soap dispenser is trivial", other stuff will get labeled as exempt (or treated as such), eventually there will be no one knowing what is exempt and what is not, and someone will treat something as exempt that clearly shouldn't have been exempt, causing an incident.

In aircraft and spacecraft design and manufacture, the rule is "safety by design". Treating everything as "needs to be certified by default" is fail-safe, it eliminates entire classes of incident causes.

As we've seen from the slight "windows falling off planes mid flight" problem which they furiously tried to cover up, Boeing has a bit of a problem with making exceptions where it actually matters.

A far more likely explanation here isn't that Boeing is being too strict and disciplined over the matter of a soap dispenser (please), but that a bunch of people have their nose in the trough.