I’m adding some second hand experience here, but what made below zero much worse for my son when he played it was that it constantly crashed, resulting in a lot of lost progress. Often crashing when saving, too, so after having accomplished something. He got it on the switch as some kind of double-feature with subnautica and below zero on a single cartridge. He played through subnautica and loved it but ditched below zero after barely a handful of hours played, purely due to the frustration, not even being at the point where those game design points would have mattered.
So what? Things are mostly valued by what the projected performance is, not the prior performance.
Also it seems that Krafton assumed they would miss the performance criteria, so they thought they’d bought it for $500 million. That doesn’t sound unreasonable for a studio that made $250 million with a single release and already had more in its pipeline.