What is wrong with them is that the concept of an early access game is common but not quite normalized. It seems like some kind of accessory contract on top of a usual game purchase, but in reality you are just buying an unfinished - sometimes not even close to finished - game with a nonzero chance of it looking like a finished game at some point before the developers die.

When people say that early access games are dying what they really mean to say is that the genie is out of the bottle with respect to the media's treatment of it and the bulk of sales are already over with and, as much as you may believe otherwise, payment up front is not an efficient method to motivate a human to finish a huge long-term project. It shouldn't be a surprise that the game's roadmap, which originally suggested that the entire game would be finished literally less than two months from the date I'm writing this post (i.e. one year from February 2, 2021), was scrapped once the team hit the motherlode.

tl;dr it's not dying but it's only really as alive as its media coverage

I've been playing computer games since the late 1980s, for the record