Not to put too fine a point on it, but the dev has been candid about certain mental health issues that they've been dealing with, and as someone that has had their own troubles with that sort of thing... frankly, it's a miracle there's still development at all. It would have been very easy for them to just... stop completely, as so many other game devs have done. So if QoL features that are low impact but still development the dev wants to do, yeah, I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt that they're still trying.
It'd be one thing if we were upset at what our money was going towards, but we're on a pirate site. The most we give to these projects is word of mouth, and at worst we can kill motivation.