For the ones taking money for it it's an easy moneygrab. The niche isn't saturated so it's easy to start a project, get a nice money bag from a couple people through patreon/substar and then, once you have enough, just abandon and keep the page open to siphon more from people who hope you return. I remember that for one of these games one of the devs first put it on hold "because they have a gf now and she wouldn't approve" and then a few months later came back and claimed to be working on the game again because they needed the money because of something with their house. They didn't even put an update out after that, they just grifted the money and returned subs and then dipped.
I don't think it starts like that for everyone, surely some people realized that making games is hard and costs time and stopped because of that.
