It was plastered all over the place that it was early access and I remember them warning everyone in a live stream that there would be bugs and such.
However, I will agree with you if they ditched paying an actuel QA team in favour of free early access players. I don’t have the answer to that though.
In that case, I have no calms with early access as long as expectations are managed and people aren’t led to believe the game is ready for launch. Which they did well.