As said, it does work.
For some completely stupid reason or another the dev you are talking about still "clings on" with doing it.
Thing is he has destroyed his reputation while doing so.
For a successful milking endeavour Yuno has to few patrons since over the course of it the patrons are almost guaranteed to dwindle in numbers when an update is not in sight.
Meaning even if he would be milking, what he likely is not for reasons I described, it would be next to ineffective while at the same time effectively killing all his future projects.
There are indeed Devs who create games/vns above average and stop right from the beginning..
There are several reasons, but the most common ones:
If you get a lot of attention, you get a lot of sponsorship and for a long time people will continue to pay in hopes of an update... which may never come (intentional or not)
There are those who expect success like a certain ICS..
And that your first VN will pay off all the debts and make up for working only on that. (and the dreamer unfortunately recognizes in a few months that it wasn't quite like that) and quit.
Some exaggerated the quality in the first ep so much that it becomes impractical to assemble and render 4K an ep in a few months..
Not necessarily, some assets in many VNs are bought (from Daz Studio to Renderotica or even Renderhub) even characters with some cosmetic changes..are used..
It's rare for a VN with assets entirely made in Blender or Daz Studio by the same DEV.
That said, there's no way to say that something made by dev X can't be copied by Z (with rare cases)
If you look around here, some fan made ones look very similar to their originals.
Yes, your artistic name ends up burned, but nothing prevents you from starting with another name or outsourced worker on some other project.
You will hardly see a Dev openly attack another here... and wash dirty linen.(so how are you going to recognize that he changed his name, if even those who know him won't say anything?)
Ps. before anyone thinks it's a direct attack on this DEV, they're wrong, I speak in general.. (until I regret that the vn is stopped)