They had to implement a lot already to add both those characters with their face expressions being coded completely differently because it's 2d, the male one has a detachable penis for crying out loud. It's not like I'm making a insane claim saying the 2 robot/techie characters have tech internals. All it could have been was a re-textured map. Just doesn't make sense you feel me?
TBH the game just extremely badly coded, there being different coding for the 2D and VR versions is likely just a product of that.
If you remember the 7.2.0h build, they didn't even test it in VR before releasing it; the VR version didn't work and they only found out days later, after numerous people reported the issue.
"This month we're giving Astera a voice! We had to redo all of her audio because we lost the unfiltered audio, but it's still the same VA: CottonTail."
And even now in 7.3.1, they said they had to re-do all the voicelines for 7.3.1., because they "lost" the original files. This likely means they don't use version control either, which is fucking insane if you're working on anykind of a project like this.