They did exactly what you suggested! The relationship with the users never went dark. They kept up with bug fixes, and kept feeding new features at a more than acceptable pace. [Edit: Here's the pace of their status updates, as evidence at https://www.reddit.com/r/factorio/?f=flair_name%3A%22FFF%22 ]
I didn't quite believe that Uncle Bob's lessons worked in the real world, but if the Wube team is sold on them, that's about as good as an endorsement as I'll ever get.
I keep thinking I should try Factorio. But given amount of time friends have spent on it, I'm scared I'll never be heard from again. One of my friends has built a whole Grafana setup for it.
As long as you're immediately understanding, you'll continue to have fun.
As soon as you need to stop and research to understand what it is that you need to do next, and then start to re-architect a bunch of things, you may or may not realise this is the same thing you do for a living.
Nothing quite like burning the candle at both ends, for fun and profit.
Personally, it's not for me. Others (including some of my colleagues) definitely do not share that sentiment.
That said, I enjoyed Mindustry for a similar period too. Factorio-lite tower-defence game.
> that the way to solve it, is to do absolutely no new features for a quarter or two, refactor the code, learn new methodologies
Even in a world without shareholders, we still are building things for users. 6 months without improvements has an effect on them, too. When possible, I think it's better to spread cleanup work out. Even if one spends 80% of the time on cleanup and 20% on features, that is much better for relationships than going dark for a quarter or two. And in my experience, continuing to do productive work during that period makes the behind-the-scenes improvements better.