Games and software operate from a different set of first principles, games are more akin to movies in that we consume them for the experience and that final level of polish often does make or break it.

Games were not updatable at the time of the quote, which makes an incredibly huge difference from products that can be regularly updated to fix issues.

I do mention that in the second paragraph. My understanding is that most [0] games don't get super-substantial updates making the game leaps and bounds better than it was in its initial state, the way continuously-developed software does. Am I wrong?

[0] Games like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, Terraria and online games being a minority.

Even if a game (or any other software) can be updated later, improving things and fixing bugs is not necessarily a business priority, because you could be adding new features or working on a new product instead.

The profit-maximizing strategy is to keep the level of crappiness that frustrates your customers, but not enough to make them switch to a competing product.

the counter quote to that is John Carmack, who was originally a fan of the "it'll ship when ready philosophy", saying he 'largely recanted from that now' when discussing Rage on the Joe Rogan podcast.

Or Duke Ellington: "I don't need time. What I need is a deadline."

It applies. I did a debloated Windows 10 IoT Enterprise install for a friend (who's giving this laptop to his future wife) and iconcache in Explorer is still broken and giving me the occasional white page icon, and nt authority\system gets access denied when trying to delete %localappdata%\microsoft\windows\explorer\iconcache* while explorer is kill.

Bad forever!