I don't think it's him. It doesn't make any sense to me that TLG was making another game. I know there have been other cases, but in this one specifically having the support that this game had both from the player base and financially. I see it as shooting yourself in the foot.
It wouldn't make any sense from a financial point of view, but there could be many different scenarios.
For example, he might have had a personal problem, and on the spur of the moment he deleted his patreon, the game files, etc.
Later, he could have regretted his decisions, and a few months later he could have decided to go back to developing games making use of the experience acquired with the abandoned project, but of course using a different identity because it would be extremely hard to take the rap after his disappearance.
Again, I'm not convinced it's him. In fact, the dev has interacted with the users of his game's thread and he writes a much better English than TLG did, not to mention that TLG wasn't much of a sociable person. He could just be a fan or an unrelated developer who liked his style and tried to imitate it.
Ayway, everyone must admit that the cheese smells really, really god
BTW, if you need a mechero I can lend you some. I don't smoke but I keep hoarding lots of merchandising mecheros for some reason