I can’t know for certain what is specifically going on there but I do work in contract manufacturing for high end scientific equipment and critical medical electronics so I do know a fair bit about the processes used. For me the dishsoap and keycards on their own don’t raise any alarms. It sounds like the main issue is poorly written incomplete manufacturing instructions, which is a big enough issue on it’s own and is an absolute monster to try and fix once your production workers have gotten used to working like that.
the soap should either be specified by brand in the manual or swapped to a certified lubecricant, that has been tested to work fully with the gasket and not cause deteriation or on any way affect the quallity of the seal.
The seals used are most likely silicone (it’s what we use on environmental chamber doors). If so there are very few chemicals that will harm them let alone dishsoap. We actually use 409 (a bathroom cleaner) spray to lubricate our seals where I work.
The dishsoap is almost certainly something they order and stock with their own internal shop supply number. The instructions most likely reference that number but that number would be meaningless to anyone else so the news article just said dawn dishsoap. It’s not going to be any random dishsoap because that’s not how industrial supply works. It would be more expensive for them to go pick up random dishsoap than to just keep ordering the same part number (that specific dawn dishsoap) in bulk from their industrial supplier.
The keycard should be replaces with a go/nogo custom card
Why in the world would you make custom tooling when there is a readily available off the shelf solution? You can just buy packs of keycards for dirt cheap and they are going to be a known thickness because they need to be to keep working in the same keycard slots. That thickness should be documented somewhere but it isn’t going to be in the manufacturing instructions because the production people don’t need it; they just need to know that the go/nogo gauge (the keycard) should fit. The more extraneous information you include on manufacturing instructions the greater the chance you have of someone missing or misreading something. If someone needs that extraneous info or something on the production floor isn’t right that’s when you bring in the engineer or process support staff who will have access to that info and the authority to make decisions based on it. If your production staff are making critical decisions on their own then something is very wrong with your manufacturing instructions (which sounds like the real problem here).