Indie means independent. They don't get their money from a publisher who tells them how to screw up the game AFAIK.
Indie does technically mean independently published, but in practice most people use it to mean "low budget small team game", which Bannerlord is not. There are some AAA games produced by teams smaller than taleworlds, which sell fewer games, and make less money.
We are talking about a sequel, and while I appreciate that putting the same features from the previous title is not a simple matter of copy/paste, it certainly should help and make things easier for the devs to recreate the same features again as it is something they have already done in the past.
On that note, there is a lot of stuff in bannerlord which is lifted directly from warband, including textures, sounds, and even bits of code. I'm not saying this is necessarily a bad thing, but it's just something people need to keep in mind.