I think you need to take the monetization into account as well. The game was a complete mess. At $20 you could maybe get away with saying, "aww, nice job for trying, I hope you learned stuff for next time!" This was a full price game, they knew what they had, this was an attempt to claw money back with a shovelware release.

I'm a little bit over the idea of feeling bad for employees at studios that are predatory and anti consumer. If there are talented and motivated creatives as we like to think, moving on from these companies can help us get great indie games and reshuffle talent in the overall industry. Bad studios and publishers going down is good for the herd.

Having watched a twitch stream of it, naahhhh, I doubt it. There would be less negativity if it werent for the LOTR license but only because nobody would even care about it then, it'd fly under the radar. It's frankly a pretty bad game from multiple aspects, the technical, gameplay and narrative. There must have been hell going on during its development.

it did mostly function

Well, mostly. It was barely playable at points