Do you even research? There are unstable updates on an almost nightly basis if you opt to participate in them and there's a new dev post on the website at least every 2-3 days. The team is hard at work revamping things like combat, monster behaviors and character progression to make the game better than ever. Its certainly nowhere near dead.
Nightly unstable builds! Oh man! You got me so excited!
The game's been out for about 8 months now. It still has less content than Terraria did on launch, it's still lacking a majority of features that were promised, and updates have come to a crawl. It's still buggy, it still wipes your save every update, hell even modders have taken to doing stuff that they promised (just like Minecraft). All they've been doing is posting things they say they'll do or concept art that isn't even implemented. Literally just go through the blog posts and see how most of them are just "we're working on this!" and it's usually, at most, a minor features. Terraria got big updates. After the game was finished and completed. This game is getting little to no updates. Before it's even "finished". It's a joke and you shouldn't defend anything that's Early Access.
Don't defend paying $15 for an unfinished game. I did and I regretted it. You're giving the developers money for an unfinished product. What reason do they have to finish it when they already got the money.