From what I can see this "overwhelming bad feedback" is exclusive to this place, other places like itch.io, Newgrounds and even reddit are free of that for the most time and when it happens is in a more respectful way and with less toxicity,
Can't say anything about how it is on discord or what amount of work is made by mods to keep it that way in each of those places but that would be a bad excuse to use and harder to accept than a simple "We just don't feel engaged to keep working in this project anymore", at least from my perspective.
Discord is pretty chill despite being open to non-patrons, who have less info about development and are logically bound to ask more often why it's taking so long, sometimes not with the best manners. Sure, every once in a while someone comes in straight-up laughing at patrons and insulting devs, but those are a clear minority; most newcomers and randos only ask if there's any ETA, get their info, and go back to their silent wait. People tend to voice their concerns respectfully, or simply stop supporting the game and leave quietly, as adults do.
In fact, I think this announcement of an upcoming ETA came because someone on Discord pointed out how misleading the progress tracker is for this update, and devs agreed with him. Since devs did a 'lousy job' estimating the tasks needed (in devs' own words) and they keep changing and editing things as they go instead of taking some days to play the whole thing and make another estimation of the actual tasks needed, the tracker has become a mere indication of the work done instead of the amount of pending work -the infamous one task added and completed per day shows they keep working on it but no longer allows people to guesstimate how much work is still to be done. So devs considered that, if everything goes smoothly in the next couple of weeks, they'll be ready to set a proper deadline they'll be confident enough to meet, so they'll share it with the game's fans despite the pressure this could put on them. We'll see.
