I think one thing that is particularly telling in this project is that they decided to reengineer their entire solution when killing Origins, then a scant few years later, with barely any progress made, seem to be back in the same boat.to be fair, it may not entirely be out of intentional money grabbing.
I've developed my fair share of small projects (and I mean small) and even those, at some points, needed reworks.
In my case, I didn't rework them, and it really showed in the later product, because what could've been simple became complicated.
It may be that they just have devs that are still learning, and in that case, you can't possibly apply the good / best solution, so after a while, all the meh / bad practices that went into the project up until then start to show up and hinder your dev time, performance, quality etc, out of which we've seen a bunch of already, so it may just be the case that Operation Lovecraft is reaching a tipping point of needing a rework to be eligible to be progressed on any further.
In short, either they're not as good devs, or they're moneygrabbing if they decide to rework, but both are very likely imo
It wouldn't surprise me if a large part of it is incompetence and poor project planning, but at least some it is surely them trying to shoehorn season passes and microtransactions into a framework they initially wrote for an x-com style single player game. It can't be easy repeatedly changing direction this late into a project and I imagine they've had to scrap large swathes of work (probably why Helius wanted to spin the single player part off into a separate game).
As somebody else highlighted earlier in this thread this studio was also born from a forum that primarily focussed on modding Illusion games. I imagine their skillsets tend more toward 3D modelling and basic scripting than the kind of C++, UE development and project management experience you'd need to run a project like this.