What a shit article. There's a massive amount of context missing.
7DTD is a game created by The Fun Pimps. Telltale Games bought the rights to produce a console port of the game from TFP. Telltale Games then contracted with Iron Galaxy to produce the port. Telltale Games went bankrupt and it's assets were liquidated, one of those assets was the rights to produce the console port. TFP managed to buy back the rights to the console port, but were unable to get any of the source code for the console port. It took years to get the rights sorted out, and it wasn't cheap.
It's a messed up situation, but console players bought a Playstation 4/XBox One game from Telltale Games, a company that went bankrupt and is defunct, and that sucks. TFP is now starting from scratch to produce a console port for the current generation of consoles and that costs money.
This feels borderline criminal. Yeah it's 11 years old, but if someone told you that an early access game stays in early access a decade, that means you need to buy it again on release, would you?
What's the point of paying for early access if need to pay again when it's stable?
Early access users took a gamble of paying a low price for a likely buggy game, that might evolve over time through user's feedback and that has a possibility of failing and never come out of early access.
Asking for the early access users to buy the game at full price is a slap on the face.
I fired up 7DTD a couple months ago, and I definitely did not feel like it was anywhere close to being done. Releasing out of EA feels like they just want to be done with it.