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I think the difference lies into passion project vs official project
Being on Patreon means that you have to follow a regular schedule of release, because people will disinterest themselves from a project that does not have at least bi-monthly updates.
It means that you need to plan enough features to draw people to fund you, and keep your promises.
It means having to cater to what your audience wants even if *you* do not like to do it.
It means having to restrain yourself to fit into Patreon's more and more strict guidelines, and carefully weighting if what you want to put in the game will attract the ire of the puritans in charge of the website.
It means having to contend with other people's expectations and sometimes irrational negative reactions (remember the fit around Oh So Hero and the female NPC?).
It means having to spend time, energy, and ressources to ensure your game is not being pirated, removing money from your sometimes precarious wages. And often this only results in a futile and frustrating attempt.
Every single of these things add a stress and a weight that, often, pulls down a project.
The best example I can think about is Fek.
The first Rack game was pushed in Furaffinity in quasi-anonymity and became an instant success, pretty much like Grove. Updates were frequent, each with its new toy and/or character to play with.
Then comes Rack 2, and you have Fek completely burning himself out on a game that was promising, but which suffered a dramatic case of feature creep. And I am convinced that this feature creep could have been corrected and reverted, were it not for the fact that these features were tied to the Patreon (and if Fek did not fall in a sunken cost fallacy).
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