Honestly i will take a single example = Project Zomboïd. An indi game that i bought in it's first year of realize. It was mediocre but has a great potential . The game have now more than 10 years and is an unique and extremly good game .Devs ,even if some updates take 1 or 2 YEARS to come out they sometimes talk to us(once a month or once every 2/3 months) on what is going on ,what are they working on , what they can't do or take too much time ,what the community wants ,etc.
They build trust with their community and game is now played more and more.
Honestly they are no major rework to do on bannerlord except maybe the AI, the rest is relativly minor and can be done by a relativly small group over the next years . They can also drop 1 or 2 dlcs to make more money on the way.
I say it again ,i have a tiny hope the game ll change directions . As i have many games going to shi* and studio finally listened to the community and making huge updates to fiw the main problems like ww3,pharaoh,Tarkov,The guild3,efz etc...
As you said mods can fix things but not everything and most of people do not play with mods in general , so some fixes are necessary ,sonner or later.