To me it reads like they’re not happy with where the game is right now, that they’d prefer to tweak it more.

But they made the choice to go with Unity early. I'm not a developer myself but I've seen many statements of people who are who say that there is a certain ceiling with Unity that's not there in AAA game engines like UE.

I work in software dev; if we don’t finish the software on time, we don’t go live with it. We might take a hit on our revenue, or we might need to ask our customer for more funding, but we don’t go live with broken software.

But then you should know that there is a difference between benchmark scores and general bugginess.

If the game is otherwise done and stable, why not just be open to the customer base and tell them about higher system requirements and ship the game? Cities Skylines 2 is no Kickstarter game. They can't ask their customers for more money beforehand. They get the money from selling a product.

If the game turns out that it's an unstable mess, I'll fully agree with you. But for now it's only about raised system requirements that are being openly communicated ahead of release.