I think that only those who donate money to the author have the right to criticize slow work. others have no such right. by the way, donators don’t walk in the author’s shoes... it’s possible that the author doesn’t have enough money from donations for normal monthly expenses and he still has to look for a job that takes a lot of time - that is, even donations - no reason to criticize the author for slow work.
1. The twist is: if only those paying are allowed to criticize it, then...nobody is - nobody "paid for" anything, that is the very premise of "donations" - charity. Nobody "buys" anything, so nobody "is owed" anything. There is a reason developers providing refunds on Patreon not only erase hefty chunks of negativity, but sometimes even gain a credit of trust should they get back to work.
2. Whilst I can buy things like "I got COVID" or even "my house burned down", the tipping point for this particular developer was the "car accident". Irphaeus
lied [about reasons for yet another delay] and was promptly exposed. Ever since, people have found it difficult to believe anything coming out of that mouth
regardless of actual validity. Hence my earlier mention of Shepherd & Wolf. "Slow work" itself has nothing to do with this, WA is hardly the only game suffering from slow/erratic development process.
3. These "monthly expenses" you speak of...well: firstly, the money is provided in good faith that it would fund game development, not improve personal wellbeing of whoever is working on it, and thus, secondly, if Patreon is your lifeline, then frankly "rape does not even BEGIN to describe how fucked you are". Find a job that DOES pay enough to support you, put the game on hold, get back to it when you can afford it. Instead, Irph started working on another game in parallel.
Bottom line is, the game itself is actually fine thus far - granted, not the best out there (sorry, storytelling), but [in my experience, at least] FAR from worst -, I enjoyed playing through whatever is available, but the person behind it is a procrastinator and a confirmed liar. The developer has proven to misplace trust, so the only metric left is development of further content-to-be-added. And that process is horrendously slow. Probably why people are so focused on it - there is literally nothing else to judge/evaluate.
P.S. there is no such thing as "rights", only "privileges".