Personally I treat early access like kickstarters at this point, I just avoid them by and large because of the rampant issues with delivery.

Unless the policy changes for early access and allow me to request a full refund if the game is abandoned and allow for something like a week of evaluation after 1.0 to determine if crap was released, I doubt I would buy most early access games at this point.

And tons of people said exactly that would happen the day it was announced.

Honest advertising can fix the perception problem. Just outright tell people that it has crashes and/or other bugs and misses content right from the start. Provide a playable demo of the current state. Or relax the refund period to GOG’s 30 days-no-questions-asked.

Early Access is great for games which are already fun to play but unfinished. For that the game needs to be in alpha or beta.
Funding the alpha is what Kickstarter is for.

What does “early access” provide?

What are its shortcomings?

How should it be fixed?

I’ve treated many games in early access like normal games and had lots of fun - which I would call successful purchases. To me EA means that not all content is there, the game is unfinished but playable. It works better for some games than others:

Timberborn in EA was playable completely and since its a sandbox, hard to notice missing content. Similar with Factorio, Valheim and Rust (I actually miss EA Rust a bit).

Hades, Baldur’s Gate 3 were story heavy games so they did rely on being complete. Maybe a little less so for Hades. They were good experiences, but I kept playing them at a minimum and waited for full release.

Early access is like a Gachapon. You may get something you like, you might get trash. The trash might become great years later or on the contrast you might hate what you liked beforehand with final-ish changes. It’s a gamble, even triple A companies do this. Games like Fallout 4 or WoW changed the game to prepare for their new games or dlc that’s to be released.