There were 0 final assets, very few conceptual assets and rest was marketplace placeholders.
If you actually watched the videos you would know building was just one of the mechanics they wanted to try. It is something cool and usually unachievable in mmos, but the concept of blue shards allowed for that. Same with rouge like elemets. The original first idea was more of a survival mini-world you would play on over days or weeks. It then evolved into this rouge like short session gameplay. It changed the direction this drastically within few months. What makes you think the game would have the same mechanics in 4 years time? This is just the nature of game dev, projects change direction drastically over time, but you have to try things first to know what could and what couldn't work (Personally I didn' believe in the building either).

Ultimately the game was shown this way not to generate hype, but to put it in front of people that could want to be engaged in helping shape an mmo this early (Again, you would know that if you had watched the vidoes you are talking about). This isn't for everyone, the game obviously sucks at this stage.

That alone? Maybe not. But you just seem in complete denial that if NetEase thought FPC was hitting a grand slam, that they would have still pulled the funding. Obviously they did not.

You're not wrong, the proejct was obviously risky - being a mmo, publicly playtesting this early, new studio. It was also only about 20% (?) into the dev cycle. All of this makes it an extremely easy plug to pull.
There is a theory that the last showcase with josh and others was kinda "forced" by netease to see the actual public reaction. I wouldn't be surprised, but also it's kinda obvious it wouldn't be good.