It just gets frustrating when when you're watching something like 7 projects go dark. They all seem to go by the same pattern:
1. Cool premise and demo
2. A few updates
3. Massive engine changes halfway through project.
4. Developer has a meltdown of sorts
5. An update after a long delay
6. Project goes dark for good.
I'm not a fan of changing engines during a project. If you have faith in your design you don't need the latest and greatest, and you don't have a team of 500 artists to capitalize on it.
And maybe the issue is the Patreon model itself. Incremental updates don't work well all the time and you have to end up spending time on some gimmick to get people to subscribe. And really, you have to do most of the work yourself, since it was hard to hire artists BEFORE the current market.
Even if you have if you have funding, my experience has been this:
1. Find an artist.
2. Find a GOOD artist out of the ten you've talked to.
3. Negotiate a rate, get some initial work.
4. Never hear from them even again.
So really need to be a jack of all trades to get an indie game out. Or compromise the hell out of your vision.