I don't see why they should just leave it, the people who paid for it deserve to get a functioning game.
I think the switching of developer is very telling. I didn't include it in the original article because I wasn't sure it was totally relevant, but there's some accusations around PlayMagic that could indicate that the failure of the original release was because of a lot more than just COVID. The CEO and creative director, Giuseppe Crugliano, would apparently overpromise to publishers about what they could do while hiring inexperienced programmers to develop their games. The publisher would only pay if certain milestones were hit every month, which necessitated a lot of crunch, and even then a lot of employees were unable to pay bills because they would either get paid late or not at all. This is something Crugliano has admitted. There's also been anonymous allegations that a toxic work culture severely reduced morale.
More anonymous allegations give more of an idea of what might have happened to XIII. Apparently the original plan was to just remaster the game with Unity plug-ins, but then they realized they didn't have access to the assets. They tried to pull them from the original game, but couldn't, so they had to pivot to a full remake, which set them back considerably (not even counting the wasted time trying to make a remaster work) and trying to do a full remake so quickly led to stuff like the art style being botched. They also had a hard time getting staff in to do stuff like remake animations and cutscenes and levels and all that. Crugliano claims it was hard to get them to move to Malta, but the anonymous ex-employees say he was blacklisted from recruitment agencies. Apparently there was also no QA department and programmers were expected to test things themselves. Overall, it just sounds like a mess, if you believe the allegations. (All these anonymous allegations come from
an article in fanbyte last September. Crugliano apparently threatened legal action against fanbyte if they published the article after they contacted him for comment.)
So I feel like Microids probably feels like they got screwed around by partnering with an (allegedly) unscrupulous developer and they're trying to set things right with a new team to preserve their reputation and make fans happy.