This was (and hopefully remains) an important story. ATK and its employees were made the scapegoats, the O-rings have always performed as designed. NASA management overruled its own (and ATK’s) engineers because they wanted the launch to proceed on schedule.
IIRC they were forced to redesign the O Rings in order to conform to some EPA mandate.
The O Rings that would have kept the Challenger crew alive were banned because they contained some chemical that the extremists at the EPA didn’t like.
Politicians over-ruled Engineers. Yes, the head of any agency is more a political than a competency issue anymore.