Boeing murdered John Barnett.

This is pretty common - planes fly all the time with broken things or with needed inspections or particular part replacements on the schedule needing to be done. Otherwise like 50% of them would be out of service at any given time having some non safety critical thing done to them. There’s a set of guidelines for what you need to fix right away or what you can mark “INOP” with a big tag and keep flying and on what timeframe the INOP thing needs to be fixed if it’s that option.

The issue is you need to have detailed understanding of what’s going on with the plane in order for that to be a safe thing to do. If there’s stuff that’s wrong with the plane that just never got caught in inspection so that no one knows that e.g. bolts are missing and part of the fuselage might explode off the aircraft at any time, then it’s gonna be hard to prioritize whether some problem you’re experiencing is a big deal or not.

"The plane was scheduled for three flights scheduled to end the evening of Jan. 5, the report continued. The plan was for the plane to fly out without passengers on its way to a maintenance facility located in Portland, but the airline approved the three flights with passengers.

The door plug then blew out mid-flight after its second flight.

The airline confirmed the events to the New York Times, but also said “the warnings it had on the plane did not meet its standards for immediately taking it out of service.”

The scheduling of the maintenance check had not previously been reported."

So Boeing is not 100% to blame here. Alaska knew the plane had a problem with pressurization and chose to keep it in flight for 3 extra legs instead of servicing it.