He only resumed regular updates after Patreon tanked due to the year long hiatus leading to the "big" Denuvo update and semi-large youtubers making extremely critical reviews of the game. He wants to milk it but current circumstances are forcing him to actually work on the game again to maintain profit.
This is my interpretation as well. The idea that they spent 14 months primarily on optimization work, including supposedly hiring a third party firm to assist, and still have the kind of low hanging fruit to deliver a 100% improvement with no visible loss in visual fidelity a few weeks after release... is insane.
In fact that they were struggling with optimization
at all in what is essentially a UE4 demo with a single small map and a few models is pretty out there. Let alone when you consider the premise that Helius is meant to have been working on this with a small team for 7-8 years.
I don't think it's an outright scam in the traditional sense, Helius clearly intends on delivering
something now even if it isn't what was originally promised, but I definitely think he has lied habitually about the work they've done, the size and competence of the team and the reasons for delay.
I also heavily suspect that the only reason they are now working toward releasing anything is because they couldn't milk Patreon indefinitely and a F2P game, if they could actually pull it off (no sign of that mind you), would keep generating that continuous revenue with minimal dev effort over time. It would not surprise me if Helius is the only real core dev excluding occasional contract work with artists and people like UC when he needs assets or someone to fix stuff he's fucked up (like using a fucking REST API to update player positions).