With no other obligations to worry about, this is probably even more alarming for some.
Of course there's no promises, but money given in this situation via Patreon, SubscribeStar, Indiegogo, Kickstarter, Twitch, whatever is all made in support of someone doing something. In the absence of an established reputation for creating content, that revenue simply doesn't get generated to begin with. That alone is enough to create expectation. We're not talking about raising money for a disaster fund to cover someone's medical bills.
Managing expectations with those who support your work is always part of the job, regardless of being your own boss, regardless of whether you've made explicit or implicit promises. Every content creator on the internet faces this issue at one point or another. As the time since your last great work advances, expectations rise accordingly. How quickly those expectations rise can be mitigated to some extent.
If you create a consistent paper trail of chronically missing your own deadlines as the head of your own project, or constantly shifting attention, or falling victim to feature creep, you leave supporters with very few conclusions. Either it's lack of foresight, lack of time management, pure laziness, or inability to manage a growing codebase such that simple changes take exorbitant amounts of time to implement.
Some of these are understandable pitfalls of being self-taught, others are character flaws. Bottom line is, if you're very bad at managing expectations, the only way to dig out of the hole is to finish the work. I don't want to speculate what the issue is, except to say that not everyone has the discipline and organizational mettle to be their own boss to the degree that they can produce consistent, quality output. Artist types especially tend to have stuggles with following through, either being over perfectionist, paralysis by analysis, or just "finding the muse."
