It's the business practice of sending the customer their boots without the sole and toe box sewn together then telling them they get most of the experience earlier this way and theyll stitch it together in a month if they have the time.
I agree it will age well, particularly with the right improvements.
I think the people that bought into the hype got severely disappointed and anyone buying the game on consoles simply got scammed, but as someone who bought the game after it had been out for a bit, I've had nothing but fun with it.
In fact, one thing CP2077 allows that most other games don't, is backing up the DRM-free installer for the patched game. Steam/PS store/Xbox Online will die one day and all their online patches will disappear forerver, but the GOG versions of most games will run in 20 or 30 years as long as you remember make a backup of the installer.
steam usually allows refunds in the first few hours of playtime, which supports this usecase as well.
This is in France, where there's a mandatory 14-day return window for online purchases. But there are restrictions on some items, such as media must be "unopened", and I guess downloading is considered as "opening".
Which is only tangentially related. Greed is the true culprit.
For a publicly traded company, especially one with short term oriented investors, some amount of brand tarnishing is acceptable.
For another similar example see Fallout 76.
It's poor leadership and short sightedness IMO.