Devs use Patreon because it works for them. People pledge on patreon because they are making a judgement that it's worth it to them. You disagree, that's valid, but your opinion isn't magically more correct than the millions of people that are happy to support devs this way.
Some devs might do it that way. Some devs don't charge anything and releasenew builds free and let people donate to support development. It's not an inflexible system
Yeah please don't defend this matter-of-fact like it's all fine.
Granted, this game is one of the ones doing this Patreon scam thing better to the point where I still do not classify this game one way or the other, and unlike for all the other games, I'm not even sure I want this game to finish, even though there's plenty of great ways they could do a sequel I could think of off the top of my head.
But understand that this current state of affairs ruined the entire thing. No games get released because those people with equally correct opinions incentivized no games getting released. When did SU start? 2016! 2016!!! It's not done, it barely updates, it makes 250k+ a year.
All the games end with the banner talking about the next version.
This has become one gigantic shitshow, that is also wealthy-levels of lucrative for some of these projects.
And that would be bad enough if all things were equal but now the games themselves have changed to to exploit this. So this is not a case of "your opinion isn't any better and" on and on. No, the thing sucks. Presently, the thing sucks. Acknowledge that it sucks.