1. We absolutely did land on the moon.
2.$$$$ NASA had a huge budget back in those days 65-72ish with a peak in 1966 when they purchased all the Saturn Vs their budget was over 4% of the federal budget. Today it’s 0.36% of the budget and a lot of the budget they do have goes to pay salaries instead of hardware etc.
3. If Elon and SpaceX can get Starship squared away it will be a game changer. Going to space, the moon and mars etc is all about price per ton to orbit. NASA spent Billions (basically 1.5 billion per launch) on 36 Space shuttle launches to send the current ISS into orbit. One starship rocket could launch basically the entire ISS. Once they are fully ready it’s speculated to be between 2 million to 5 million per launch. That’s orders of magnitude in difference.
4. It’s basically impossible to fake a moon landing on earth. The physics and terrain is impossible to replicate on a scale big enough to replicate at a movie set. You can replicate a vacuum in small scale but you can’t replicate 1/5 gravity to any believable degree unless you are in a pool and that makes it own issues that make it different.
