but a lot of devs would get a LOT more shit for this whole development mess.
Generally because a lot of other devs would start sandbagging long before the game was anywhere near finished, start padding things out with filler, putting out multiple low-content updates, then keep missing deadlines without pausing Patreon at all, and then ultimately never finish at all. Compounded by pushing for a "slow burn" game that barely even gets to anything meaningful before they abandon it.
There's mainly a lot of goodwill here because up until this final update, the track record was really good, and the story as a whole has paid off really well. Even now the game is mostly finished, and just missing an "epilogue" to cap it off. So people are much more willing to cut slack and be a little more patient because the dev is already doing better than 97% of the other games on this site.
Does that mean they
can't flake off and leave the game unfinished forever? No, all the goodwill in the world doesn't guarantee a happy ending. But it means the dev does probably deserve the benefit of the doubt more than a lot of others.
Even aside from that, the last few years have been incredibly shitty and disruptive for a lot of people. Actual AAA studios are having trouble meeting deadlines and getting stuff done, it's not surprising that single devs working entirely on their own and crowdfunding projects might occasionally falter as well.
And we're all mostly freeloaders on a pirate site complaining about things we don't pay for anyway.