Other devs ... maybe. This dev told his supporters to reduce payments when he saw that he could not release the update in time.
Yes, that is a yellow flag. Green flag would be stopping payments. I have seen a dev (only one, I think) stop payments when the update was taking too long or on hold. Again, I have no skin in this, I have not paid anything.
A second reason was of course that he wanted to change the narrative style and add some gameplay elements. And last but not least the early game scenes now have the same visual style as the last ones.
These are the exact points I mentioned as red flags.
Straight up, I like Aleksey's work. He took this on to finish the story someone else started and he released the demo & 2 updates in the last 6 months. Those are good signs. I have enjoyed this game & the remake seems to be fixing some of the frustrations on how to advance the story when you are stuck. Reworking the code, also means the updates will be easier to get finished, at least the coding side of the story.
Heck, I just noticed a few days ago that a certain City game finally did an update & it is now finished. So yeah, some devs, even after an extended time, do finish games. As for me, I can sit and wait until there is much more content.
