Those people tend to be generally not active in the threads, and only come to complain when the update drops with the whole "It's milking" "I'm glad I left" "Where's the update dev" blahblah schtick.
Funny thing is, more often than not they tend to be the first ones to be in line to grab the update.
Then they go silent again, ready to come back and drop another complaint with next update while grabbing it; rinse and repeat the endless cycle of hypocrisy.
Dev is a solo dev who previously had a primary job (restaurant iirc) and was only doing this as a hobby. The game went through a major gameplay overhaul (for v0.7) which took quite a while to implement.
Also, recently him and his girlfriend got engaged, so the whole wedding preparations as well as moving in to their own home was a thing.
So a lot of irl stuff happened.
Though good thing is, with Season 1 out on Steam now (well been out a while), he's stated he's going at this dev work for this game as full-time job and has begun working on Season 2.
So expect possible statements and plans from
HopesGaming soon-ish.
As for how much of content increase it has been, that would totally be dependent on where you were the last time you played it.
If it was before the rework (v0.07), I'd say you have quite a large chunk of content to play through.
But even if it was post-v0.07, I'd still say there would still be quite a decent amount to play, especially if you are playing Full-Experience mode.