Haha, why didn't they tell your relative clearly during the initial visit that they're not in an immediate danger? What if they died of a heart attack or something after the first visit after the doctors scared them?
I don't quite recall devs on Patreon doing that, but if you look at western devs and their games that have been in development for some considerable time and which are typically represented on Patreon/Subscribestar you can pretty easily differentiate between reliable and established devs with consistent updates like N_taii, Hangover Cat, Azienda and the ones that are just milking patrons and seemingly plan to earn money from development of some single game till they retire or something, just adding some bait CGs sometimes as you say and releasing updates that are far and between and/or have little content (A Wife and Mother, Jessica O'Neil, TACOS. As for TACOS the updates might be more or less consistent now, but as far as I understand dev restarted the game twice so now it's the third iteration with somewhat upgraded CG and pretty much the same mindless fuckfest for a plot, and it'll need quite some time and updates to catch up with the 2nd iteration).
Former ones (N_Taii et al) seem to outline their projects in advance and generally know what they want and then flesh it out, at least they plan for a few updates ahead, I think. E.g. I recall HC posting some sort of chart outlining some branching and plans before the first release of A Promise Best Left Unkept in late 2021. The latter ones in many cases just seem to go on and on adding few scenes with each new uptade to keep milking patrons without overall plan or ending in sight.
But many devs and projects are in between of these extremums of course. Devs might have daytime jobs when they start developing a game, and maybe they don't have an overall plan for their project including how it'll end - but still they try to do a good job and roll out solid updates once in a few monhts.
P.S. Sad that
Navigating the Rift seemingly got abandoned.