I don't think anyone would have an issue if there was a giant watermark that said "CONCEPT" across ones that are no where near being represented in the final product yet, but it obvious that these companies are being intentionally deceitful.
I'm struggling to think of a diplomatic way to express how naive I feel this statement is, so I'll just leave it at that.
The online community doesn't even need real reasons to be angry, they'll make them up at they have to. It's somewhat ridiculous to suggest they aren't capable of ignoring a "CONCEPT" watermark to get riled up about "broken promises".
The online community consist of millions of people, of course some of them will always be angry. However when you have millions of people hating you and very few defending you then there are usually a good reason to it, otherwise they don't unite like that.
Example: Nintendo announcing that the first game to use their paid subscription pokemon storage system wont actually be able to use all pokemon, and that no game in the future will either, meaning that some pokemon people paid to store and reuse later will never be able to be used. This lead to a lot of hate on the game, including some over the top criticism of the graphics which otherwise wouldn't be an issue but now most of the energy goes towards hating the game so nobody bothers to defend it.
There is usually a "reason" people get riled up online, whether that reason is "good" is usually pretty debatable to most rational people. And claiming that any "good" reason is able to be stretched into all sorts of other criticisms as you state is an even shakier stance to take.
Personally, I'm not convinced that the online gaming community is worth caring about in the aggregate. The community is so dwarfed by people not interesting in participating in arguments about their hobby online that the separation between people who have legit criticisms and people just looking to be angry about something isn't meaningful.
Say you have a million players for a game you've created, and 30,000 of those players participate regularly in online discussions, with 25,000 of them being reasonable and 5,000 being nonsensical (and the 5,000 is largely going to be at least the same if not more vocal than the 25,000). How much time and effort do you really want to spend trying to separate those 25,000 from the 5,000 given your playerbase as a whole?
I think you're wrong about that.
https://i.redd.it/rk5t6snmp8531.jpg
The tree (and background) is from the new Pokemon game, yet it looks perfectly at home in a game released nearly 21 years ago. Game Freak has been pumping out cut rate Pokemon games for years and they deserve every last bit of the hate.
"WORK IN PROGRESS - DOES NOT REPRESENT THE FINAL LOOK OF THE GAME"
As well as having similar messages reiterated by the narrator throughout.
Previously CD Projekt Red was roasted for perceived "downgrades" in The Witcher 3, notably in lighting which CDPR had to change to accommodate the day-night cycle in the game.
That said, hype for Cyberpunk 2077 is incredibly strong right now. We'll get to see whether players really do take disclaimer messaging into account when the final product launches, no doubt with "downgrades" evident in many facets of the game.