Bannerlord a grift? No. What it was, is a troubled project that's mostly playable but has a few features that are severely flawed and need work.
Quite frankly I can think of games released in much worse condition. Skyrim for one. In terms of both compexity and stability this game puts Skyrim to shame. Certainly Bannerlord's engine has Skyrim's beat by an order of magnitude, and Skyrim was released by an allegedly AAA developer, not bad work for a small team.
It's a game with a lot of issues but more positives than negatives. Was it ever going to live up to superfan expectations? No. TaleWorlds has never shown the kind of the coding skill required to pull off the masterpiece that fans wanted. With that said, I'd say with a straight face that Bannerlord is probably actually LESS flawed than vanilla Warband and has far more features. It's playable and even enjoyable. And its unit trees are far less broken than Warband where a handful of Knights can take entire castles on their own
If you want AAA polish, get it from a AAA company. TaleWorlds is not that and never has been. They're a small to medium sized developer that tried to make a massive game and discovered the hard way that the quick-good-cheap balance isn't so easily fooled. That's about it.
The problem with this game is that TaleWorlds' ambition was not matched by skill. They've done the best they can with what they are and aren't sure of the way forward or what to do to fix the remaining problems. That's understandable and could be where the story ends for Bannerlord. But no, this game was never a lie or a grift. There's a lot of hard work and passion that clearly went into this game. I got my money's worth out of it. It just might take more coding ability than the team has to finish the remaining systems in a way that satisfies those who, unlike the OP, haven't already been poisoned by their own illusions to expect far more than was possible of a small team making a big game.