You explain it from your point of view, for the dev, if notifying on discord is enough, that's how it will be, if he loses followers it's his problem, your way of how you think he should treat his patrons and the way he thinks about how he should treat them are different, those who have the right to complain are their patreon and from what I read they have done it by message on patreon and got their response.But that's the problem... a lot of people will just assume abandoned the moment they see no activity on Patreon, Discord and this site are not the place to communicate this type of thing, like a break, or an issue that will make you be off for some time, can't really blame people for thinking the game is done if the dev is not updating the place where the billing happens, which should always be the first place to be updated, he just needs to copy the same message he puts on Discord to Patreon, if he can't do that, why would anyone think he will finish the game.
Again, after knowing what the dev posted on Discord and this site, I'm pretty sure he will go back to work on the game after a break and nothing will have happened, but he probably lost quite a few followers for something that could've been avoided by just taking 10 minutes to log in to Patreon and post something, I might be pushy about this, but that's because I feel like a lot of devs don't take this seriously enough, and it's for a lot of people, a red flag, and an automatic ignore, or at least will make it so they won't consider supporting.
F95 is more than anything a means to advertise and start to be known, once a fan base is secured, many developers forget the page where they started and only focus on their official pages.