There is no problem with cliffhangers in a "work in progress", since it is reasonable to expect they well be resolved next time and they exist to create tension. Cliffhangers are absolute inexcusable dogshit as a full ending though, and no, an open end is not the same as a cliffhanger.
The problem here is that the story is going nowhere, and has been treading ground for a while now.
I think the problem with the cliffhangers is they're overused here, and a lot less effective when the media resolves them slowly.
Cliffhangers are about tension and release. Have something shocking/unresolved happen before a break for tension, then come back and resolve it for a release. If you're just constantly doing them, then it's a lot harder to create tension because something shocking happening just becomes, "Oh I guess the update/episode's about to end. Yup." They lose their punch, and there's no tension, just normality.
Meanwhile, there's a reason book endings don't use cliffhangers too often: You can only be tense about media for so long, so if you're not doing a regular weekly/monthly schedule, it's a lot harder to have a release. You can get away with it with monthly releases too, but most of those monthly releases have an exact release date ahead of time, and generally are exactly a month. Meanwhile, while this game has a "monthly" release date, it's more of "month and a half-ish" release date that happens on a day you don't know ahead of time. Like, I'll be honest, I load my save after a new update and get a few lines in before I go, "Oh, wait, yeah, this is resolving that thing." So there's no release, because the player didn't have any tension remaining.
Add to that the fact that, as noted by someone else above, many of these cliffhangers are less cliffhangers and more awkward pauses in a conversation (Like the one previous to this update where Machi knocks on your door and there's nothing actually surprising about it, instead the update just annoyingly bisects the overall conversation you're having) and you have a recipe for how to misuse cliffhangers to remove any and all effect they could have.
