No one who works hard and takes pride in what they do chooses to delay presenting their efforts to the public (if they feel it's completed to the best of their ability). It's human nature to want that praise and recognition. Because of that (and how far behind the title is already), his story doesn't add up. That doesn't necessarily mean he's doing something nefarious, though. He probably just spoke a little optimistically or maybe exaggerated how complete things were earlier this year, then the roof fell in on him and he got stuck.
Your health and real life complications are things you don't want spread around the internet. Personally, when my shit goes south, I just tell people I was really busy at work. About 6 months ago I spent 2 weeks in jail and another 6 of community service after a series of events ending with me pissing on cop car. I tell my patrons I'm "Busy at work." They don't need to know all that. I would expect a story about "wanting a big update!" was probably the best excuse he could come up with, without revealing too much. Since no one is gonna believe he was busy at work with how much he makes.
It would be really really strange if he only now has invested in a high end GPU. And not even an RTX 2080..
The 2080ti doesn't scale very well in cost, especially if you're considering a bulk purchase. The 25'ish% performance gain over a 1080ti is minuscule considering the price is 2x that of a 1080ti (which, by the way, is 11gb of video memory. That is what I assumed the '11' meant since the non-ti builds are 4gb or something). A 1080ti will still be considered a respectable mid-range card in 2022 and the prices are much more reasonable. Assuming he's buying them in bulk. He also spoke like he'd be upgrading next year, so he might be waiting for the prices of 2080ti to come down a bit.