I recommend talking with people who know more about spaceflight.
Yes, because asking on HN if such people would be willing to answer obviously gets you downvotes and comments like this.
This is why SpaceX cares more about TWR for their engines than traditional rockets did. It goes from making a negligible difference to a huge component of how much fuel they need to keep for landing.
The 23x more launches figure comes from HLS (Nasa sponsored mission to the moon). They may well change the configuration of that anyway, but if you want to refuel in orbit, that's what it costs. It's hard to get fuel to orbit (or any sort of payload). Previous Moon missions haven't refueled anything, but they couldn't return anything heavy from the moon's surface, the vehicle got smaller and smaller as it went and many parts were left behind, so it's not comparable. You can be sure if it's cheaper to somehow do this mission with expendable boosters, they'll think about doing that.
On a normal mission just to earth orbit, there is one booster and one starship, and reusing the booster is more a question of why not save some money for a little more propellant use? The reususable booster doesn't contribute much extra weight, it uses little propellant for boostback and landing.
The booster also doesn't go all the way and you need a booster if you're going to reach orbit (due to that equation), so it doesn't take much to make it reusable. So all in all, why not make it reusable if you can? What would you save from using expendable ones?
Without internal figures no one can say what is ultimately financially better. Especially now that the development is a sunken cost.
The point is the ship and rockets are expensive vs fuel. Fly a Starship 100 times the cost is amortised over the flights and fuel+bit of refurb maintenance is tiny.
The fuel (+ oxidizer) is basically free compared to all the other costs.
It doesn't take the same amount of fuel to land as it does to lift.
Speaking as a Kerbal Space program playing, internet commentor, It's probably <1% of the fuel to briefly counteract terminal velocity as it is to lift off and reach space.
I don't think that this is the case when using the atmosphere to shed most of your velocity, which is what we do when landing on Earth. Propulsive braking would be another story, but you can avoid that on bodies that do have some atmosphere. In our proximity, only the Moon and Mercury would need propulsive braking, but Moon's gravity is low and Mercury is hard to visit anyway.
That said, once you use the atmosphere to cushion what is basically a fall, the weight of the necessary heat shield comes to the equation too.
That's still 1000x cheaper than... building a new airplane every flight.
And anyway those numbers area about moon missions, not low earth orbit.