So many people buying into early access titles do not realize how many games never get released regardless how much work was already put into them, and because of a lot more reasons than "we ran out of money". Personal health of the main dev, disagreements within a dev team, financial issues, Real Live(TM) happening, hardware failure and data loss and so on can all stop a project before it can get a 1.0 release. Before early access, these titles simply never appeared on the market, preventing people getting burnt.

I think early access has helped to bring more projects to a final 1.0, but financing is just one part of the equation, and many gamers do not realize that. I only buy EA titles that are very obviously passion projects that have had regular and meaningful updates for a while and have a realistic roadmap that doesn't suffer from feature creep. Everything else i am interested in, i simply wait - better to pay 10 bucks more for a finished project than 10 bucks less for something that never will get finished.