But I am curious what you think a fair/respectable update schedule is: given the dev team size, the type of game, coding, art, and writing.
Dev team size: Two? Crush and 'the lovely Victoria'
Type of game: pretty linear VN (in its present state)
Coding: Pretty simple and easy-to-learn. This is an HTML-based browser game. Have you created websites in HTML? It's not rocket science. HTML became the foundation of WWW in the days of Web 1.0, exactly because it was simple and easy for millions to pick up.
Art: provided by the external artist Victoria, not Crush
Writing: well, that's what Crush mainly does
Taking all this into account, plus the episode size and the fact that Crush is one of the Patreon-developers who is above the threshold of being able to work on his creation full time, I would say 1-2 months per an episode would be perfectly reasonable.
Another Twine HTML-game I am following on this site, Masters of Raana, has released three updates in 2023 (I think).
* My number is 4 large updates a year (so 45+ minutes of play time each). Each update taking around 3 months maximum. I expect side-quests to take no longer than 2 months. Am I the delusional one, or do we all agree? or do people have different ideas on timing? *
Three months per episode is how I arrived at my prediction he will be able to finish the side quests this year and that's about it. I assume the first one will be ready in the summer... June maybe. The next one in early autumn and the third one by Christmas... I don't know why the side-quests should be quicker.
He might very well hit a writer's block, because the heroine hooking up with a random Russian dude she met when she was high does not flow naturally or something... but hopefully those beat sheets or whatever will help him to get into more of the type of workflow he envisaged when he posted the schedule last autumn.