And I'm pretty sure one of the major arguments that has been made continuously here was that they kept presenting it as third-person while it was in active development, right up until the 2018 rug-pull reveal where they declared "actually it was never going to be third-person." That WAS the point you were asserting as well, as far as I can tell. That there was NEVER any intention of making the game Third-Person.
Clearly that isn't the case, and the reason for so much bad blood in 2018 was because no effort was made to correct this until they had already locked in the current build. The decision didn't magically happen at E3 in 2018. This decision was made before E3, but nobody was informed of it UNTIL E3 for the purpose of maintaining hype.
Furthermore, the arguments made back then and still is being claimed was that it was for the purpose of "immersion" and "artistic vision" but the reality is that it was most likely just too difficult or too expensive, or both. This means they clearly had a few other builds that didn't work out as intended (which is something we also have reports of), so they used the one that worked the best, kept all the third-person stuff (like customization) but cut the actual third-person gameplay. There is plenty of proof of this, no less, if one considers the attempted ransoming of the game a few years back. CDPR wasn't bothered at all or intimidated - most likely because what was being ransomed was an older build that they were no longer using.
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