> the dev was making breaking changes that would require a full rewrite
This is funny because I already get the feeling a lot with management sim / automation type games that I'm pretty close to doing the kind of thing I'd do at work, except only the fun parts and without getting paid. Often that's the reason I quit playing these types of games after a while - having to deal with migrating legacy code after breaking API changes would bring this feeling to a new level I bet.
That's why I don't tend to play these games. I was about 5 hours into trs1000 when I was like man I could just learn GPU or fpga with a real editor instead but that would be useful. And stopped playing. With factorio I could be laying out circuit boards. So I did that instead.