This is exactly what's going on. He has nothing and is now essentially just now working on anything for real.
It's like when you had a class project to to turn in a certain week but you procrastinated till the weekend before. Monday not ready so you keep bs-ing the teacher that you have it the next day and the next for a lower grade. But then it's Friday and still show up with some unfinished bs.
Yes.
You can actually see it in his posts too. After all, people who lie a lot usually have some threads of truth in their lies.
In this instance, he really has been feeling shitty (because he's behind on his work) and isn't sleeping much (because he's behind on his work).
His stated reasons are just things he made up, or exaggerated truths intended to look worse than they actually are.
Maybe he really did have Renpy issues, but they were not enough to not release an update. After all, he supposedly did a lot of playtesting for weeks prior.
Maybe he has talked to an IRL friend, but he did not hire them to help out in any way. After all, this friend has yet to say anything. We have no evidence this friend is real at all. And he's been "hired" for 2 weeks now.
Maybe he did have an IRL issue yesterday, but not enough to miss the deadline. Probably a slight inconvenience that took him away from his PC for an hour or two so he couldn't cram more renders in the queue.