I remember a few games which didn't require such sacrifices from developers.

Some even commercial. Like NWN, with people making their own campaigns without, you know, any effort spent by the developers of the game itself.

Of course when the business model is milking players and making it problematic (either technically or by paradigm) to satisfy interest with community-made modifications, then all the load is on the devs or else the game becomes irrelevant. Well, guess whose fault that is.

Don't take early access money if you don't plan to be giving frequent updates. It's the nature of the beast.

People don't expect constant updates from pokemon because when you buy it, it's "a complete game". They may drop patches and add content but it's not expected the way it is from a game supposedly in active development like an early access game is.

The game is released, for a certain amount of money. If people don't like what they get for their money, they simply should not buy it.

Except you don't find out the devs/publishers released a broken game until after you buy it. Which is like, way too common. You can direct your frustrations to the publishers who insist on pushing out broken games and fixing them later.

PC/Console games take massive amounts of man hours to make and as I see it the point of Early Access is to give smaller Indie Developers the funds to hire more people and get the entire game made in an achievable time frame (though some of these things still take almost a decade to get there).

It's a bit like Kickstart, but for Early Access there needs to be enough of a product to appeal to gamers (and hence quite some time invested into creating it up to that point, plus a decent idea and an actual game play which is deep enough and has at least a good enough basis of gameplay design that it's actually fun to play), which also means scams are far less likely because just getting the game all the way to a level that qualifies it for Early Access is already quite the investment in time and possibly money plus worse comes to worse and the developer stops development immediately after caching in with Early Access, buyers still got themselves immediatelly a small game at a cheap price, though not the "dream" full game they were promised they would eventually get.

How long should they be forced to walk on a treadmill for, then?

Remove 'gamers' and insert 'bloated management'.