If your car breaks down but you decide to wait for the tow truck even though you have a backup car ready to go in case things get bad are you still "stranded"?
The constant in all the news cycles is about how they've been stranded all this time. Which isn't just a bit misleading, its a flat out lie.
Even when starliner departed, they werent standed. There was litterally an emergency plan prepared for how they'd get them home if they had to, and made modifications to the existing crew 8 ship to allow for this. This was all covered in the briefing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGOswKRSsHc
So once again, nobody was stranded. They could've come home at any point if they needed to.
The definition of stranded is litterally "left without the means to move from somewhere." which is VERY clearly not the case.
You're leaning on some "ackshully technically" definition of stranded. The fact that they had emergency contingencies in place the whole time doesn't invalidate the fact that they were stranded in the common colloquial sense of the term.
If I'm at work and my car breaks down, I'm stranded. I call my buddy to pick me up, and if there is an emergency I can ask a coworker to drive me home, but I'd rather not inconvenience them and so I am stranded until my buddy comes.
The word stranded is almost never used to describe scenarios where literally no contingency exists, because such scenarios almost never happen in modern live. To insist on such pedantry would be to effectively retire the word from common parlance.
