He (rightly) sees the commercial aspect of space technology to be a deadend, but nasa is spending a huge amount of time and effort working towards enabling it in favour of doing nasa things.

I take issue with commercial being a dead end in space. Not only has commercial spaceflight been VERY successful for NASA, it has saved huge amounts of money over what Griffin was proposing instead. Griffin was advocating for the Constellation program. Lets take just a piece of that where commercial spaceflight is there instead: flying crew to the ISS which we do two times per year.

The Constellation program would have used the Ares I rocket and the Orion Crew capsule. The estimated flight cost of this configuration was about $1.1 billion together for two flights. source

The commercial option used instead is the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon capsule. The actual flight cost is $176 for the same two flights per year. source

For the cost of ONE year of NASA Constellation flights to the ISS, the commercial solution pays for 6 1/4 years of flights instead.