I wonder how much Sony played a part in that crap, as in forbidding them from telling that the game wouldn't reach the initial pitched vision before the release to not affect sales etc. If that's the case, it sucks that Hello Games would take the fall for that. I guess it's always scary but often necessary to go with black and white answers: he did actually say in an interview that you could meet other players if you happened to be in the same place, it's not just his comment on 'don't look at it as a MP game' that built that particular hype, but carefulness and experience should have pushed him to say 'our plan is to...' so it at least doesn't seem like a flat out lie when the game comes out. That said, I just think people are being stupid just once more, and it's all about the hype they project onto the game that was never viable.
Like the director of Deus Ex Mankind Divided was quoted a few years back saying that bad PC ports were a disgrace and an insult to PC gamers and then they ship a broken ass PC port, but I don't see the internet up in arms because I don't think too many people were fantasizing about having a good PC port for the last couple of years.