Nah, the answer is much simpler. Red Dead Redemption 2 was announced just a couple of months before release, which is why a lot more preorders accumulated throughout this shorter period of time, but the article in question completely ommited that, as Sild said, Cyberpunk was announced and started taking preorders over a year ago, with the first months, after they started, being the most intense in terms of the presales. Also the full blown marketing campaign for RDR2 started a little earlier then in case of Cyberpunk, which supposed to begin in October and intensify even more in November. The reason for why they start the most intense part of the marketing just the next month, is because, according to their experience, majority of preorders is done just a couple of weeks before release, when the people are sure of the release date, so this is why they planned this for the last month and a half before release. Things like not enough marketing last year or some bugs in the background, that majority of people didn't even notice when watching the promotional materials, don't really factor into that.
Overall I would say that, taking those things under consideration, they might be in fact much closer to the number of RDR2 preorders then this article implies.
Actually, RDR2 was officially announced in October 2016, which was 2 years before release. They just had a better release and marketing plan by keeping quiet about details until they had the game done about 3 months prior to release, and did non-stop quality marketing for those 3 months.