This reads to me like creator burnout. Spinning the wheels with any lack of direction or concrete effort to finish key quests or game areas is the kind of thing that happens when the passion for a project dwindles but you're still making bank off of Steam sales and Patreon subscribers.
Compare the state of updates for Claire's Quest to the same game 3 years ago or to Overgrown: Genesis and it's a night and day difference. Frequent updates every 2-3 months with substantial questlines, new areas, consistent advancement of the main story, and a general cohesiveness of content and themes - it always felt like both games were progressing, regardless of questline or area. But now there's absolutely no sense to what will be updated next, multiple questlines exist in perpetual limbo for years without update or resolution, updates and communication grows less and less frequent, and the core of the story seems to be utterly forgotten in favour of adding more and more niche fetish content in brand new questlines that bloat the game and muddle the concise themes that used to exist.
Restarting the intro and other elements of retreading the same ground for no apparent reason also signals a lack of direction and ideas for where to take the narrative, let alone how to resolve this massive story of cross-continental chaos, corruption, and politics that has never felt like it's gotten past the halfway point of the second act.
