And yet, I wonder if they couldn't release a production build without all that (maybe crash handling/reporting). Early access games are what agile development is to software - or should be. Going to production several times a day without giving up on the application's performance, and such.
Early access game devs pushing unoptimized releases should set up their release system betterer.
This exactly - no reason why you couldn't ifdef everything that is debug only, if your team is consistent with it from the very start.
Backfilling existing code with ifdefs and dealing with compile breaks and other more weird things can be intimidating, time consuming, with hard to define ROI, so I can empathize if someone doesn't do it.
Early access game devs pushing unoptimized releases should set up their release system betterer.