Don't know much about SoT, but NMS is made by a company of only around 25 employees and made probably well over $100M in its first year even despite the horrible reception. Sean Murray and his company was/is swimming in cash. This let them focus on fixing and adding things to the game that should have been there on release even if it didn't improve the game's reputation and result in sales going forward. But, it did. From their last financial statement they had a profit of almost £33M in 2022 from £39M in game sales. That was helped by a £7M tax rebate. But in 2021 they still had a profit of £18M from £27M in sales.

Edit: Also, from all the money they've made they had £138M in straight up cash in the bank/on hand in 2022. Hello Games could run at its current expenses for many, many years without any additional profit if they wanted to.