Perhaps said developers should respect their captive buying audience by not putting out half-done products as "ready to ship", then forcing said customers, reviewers, and onlookers to hold their collective breath for months and hope that they fix everything that's fundamentally broken and put the kind of meat on the bones that was expected at launch. These aren't charity cases. They are businesses asking for your hard-earned money. They are not entitled to our money and if they fail to make a competent product while still continuing to ask for $60, they should earned criticism. And no, it doesn't have to be delivered in a nice way.
Don't apologize for SoT's launch and don't act shocked that someone (or most people) would put it on a failure list. Just like No Man's Sky (which you probably also had fun poking at when it launch for many of these same reasons), sometimes you don't get a second chance to make a first impression. Sea of Thieves came exactly as Joe described it: pretty to look at, empty, lifeless, dry, bland and tasteless. Just like 76, you could make your own fun with friends (because everything can be fun with friends), but combat was trash, customization was trash, so on and so on. Many people played it for a few weeks and moved on. Many of those people will never return. Whether they should try it again is a different question, but the game still revolves around playing with friends and if friends aren't playing...well...neither are those players, you know? It's really important that GAAS games start off strong. Sea of Thieves was a space shuttle with a bad O-Ring.
Sea of Thieves was appropriately placed here, IMO. It was easily Microsoft's most hyped game, years in the making. It came out to a really good amount of buzz and streamers were having fun with it. I remember Twitch having 100k+ viewers watching it at any given time. That lasted about 9 days. The cracks that were pretty obvious in the games execution (but masked by players just having fun with each other being silly) became holes that started sinking the proverbial ship. It's good that the game is in a decidedly better state today than it was then, but don't be shocked if few outside of the most dedicated players care anymore. Just like No Man's Sky and many other big games that never reached the level of success hoped for, SoT had its chance to make a big mark and it blew its chance.