Here's a summary of what's going on based on their Discord comments & my experiences with the demo:
They're hopeful Steam Early Access will start sometime next year but not able to give a specific date yet.
The core team (CEO / level designer, programmer, & writer / quest designer) are still working on the game, but only part-time. We got lots of bugfixes to the combat beta over the summer, including squashing a nasty bug causing crashes for Win 7 users. Combat demo is very stable now, but there's still some bugs and missing features.
Their CEO is talking with potential publishers / investors to get them more funding so the core team can resume working on the game full-time. The pandemic has slowed this down a bit as everything has to be done through virtual chats, rather than in person meetings.
At this point, most of the art assets are done (though I think they want to make more character portraits and polish existing ones) so aside from bugfixing & implementing remaining features what they need to do is create more content (i.e., quests) so the game can move to SEA.
As to why they don't continue to sell beta access or pre-orders to raise funds, it's reasonable to assume it's because (1) this would not raise the amount of funds actually needed so the core team can resume working full-time (2) any publisher / investor they're in the middle of the negotiations with would likely frown on that... considering that a deal would involve giving them a percentage of all future sales
