I just tend to think in Occam's Razor terms, folks tend to get a tiny bit conspiratorial, but I tend to think simpler answers tend to be a little closer to the truth.
In cases like this I find that one of Churchill's maxims is the most useful one.
"Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence."
The publisher is obviously very skilled in motivating online mobs and getting them fired up to support something that ticks all the right boxes. But it's becoming increasingly clear that he doesn't have any idea how to deal with real world issues existing beyond social media like finances, logistics and legal contracts.
There's actually a dangerous middle ground for small businesses where they get successful enough that the guy(s) who started them can't handle the volume any more but not successful enough to expand without outside investment. Wildly successful crowdfunded projects often go that way. Even if he was acting in good faith (and few here will assume that) he probably won't be able to deliver on what he promised given the way the scale expanded beyond his expectations and costs have shot up this last year.
He also doesn't seem to grasp that the reason the kickstarter was so successful was that Social (Justice) Media got the news to every single person who thought it was a good idea during the fundraising stage. People who had no intention of playing this or any other RPG funded it because they liked the sound of it. Now he's finding that this was it- anyone who is willing to pay money for C&C has already done so and any further sales are going to be negligable in comparison.
In the real world we have these things called Costs, Debts and Deadlines and they don't change or go away because you can motivate a bunch of people on twitter to being outraged on your behalf. The most recent posts from C&C's creator suggest he's meeting these Real World problems and trying to fight them using the only skillset he's ever developed. It's not going to work and I have zero sympathy for that. I'll save that for all the RPGs actually worth playing that have met or will meet the same fate at the hand of these same factors.