Producers sometimes like to include personal references.

I'd rather have that than micro transactions or unfinished games with half of what was promised or less.

It's not ideal, but compare that to the toxic nature of most bigger studios... might be the lesser of two evils. And I strongly suspect that the donor insertion isn't going to compromise the vision or quality of the game.

It's definitely a bit weird, but probably better than the shenanigans of AAA studios.

I mean it's portraits and statues, and you work with the artist and devs for all that stuff, seems like work they would be doing anyways and now it gives community engagement

They only intend to fund development for a year with this kickstarter, and try to get a publisher on board once they've shown there is interest. That information should've been closer to the top though, a bit buried down there.

From the site:

We do want to make it clear, however, that our aim with your pledges is to fund full-time development for one year in order to produce an early access build. We would release this early access build to the appropriate backers and take feedback as we continue to release updates. We also aim to take this early access build to publishers to seek further funding, with the goal of completing the entire game.

They've also been working on it since 2019.

Do you even know what Daggerfall is? They're looking to make the same scope with this one. If you know how that game worked it's easy to see why they could do it again with Unreal.