Was HMS Intrepid's engine trouble genuine?

Did HMS Intrepid really suffer the engine trouble blamed for disrupting the landing sequence?

Yes; the ship had been hurriedly reactivated after serving as a parts source, and her engineering staff struggled continuously to keep her machinery running.

HMS Intrepid had been run down and used as a source of parts for Fearless before being rapidly reactivated for war. Her machinery problems were therefore the predictable consequence of material condition, not a convenient excuse invented during the landing sequence. The chief engineer kept the plant functioning through extraordinary effort while engineering colleagues recognized how close the ship remained to failure. Captain Peter Dingemans accepted responsibility, which made it easy for later critics to treat caution as a personal defect. That framing can obscure the engineers whose improvisation kept an unreliable ship available at all. Intrepid's delay belonged to the broader Falklands pattern of conducting an operation with vessels and systems that had not been prepared for immediate combat.