I think that point is very valid, 9 years is a good portion of one's life to be involved in a game, and in being part of a team that was setting the scene for the future of the game - so just 'walking away' might be tough!
In truth none of us on the outside of Frontier knows exactly where the game is going, so leaving today because "I don't like where the game is" could be sensible, or not if changes are introduced to negate even a few dislikes. Frontier are not particularly good at disclosing what tomorrow might bring, are they?
ED has always been a "Curate's Egg" for me, I consume the bits I like, can ignore the remainder, pretty much, as there is no need to be doing everything available, all of the time.
It's a crazy long time - and I'm not far off, been playing since launch, with about a year's break in total (Horizons lauch really deepened the rabbit hole for me) and since then pretty much regularly throughout. 4,000 hours, likely more towards 4,500 now, two purchased copies, hundreds of Euros spent on quite frankly sub-par cosmetic tat but it's tat that I enjoyed. There's not a single other game that pulled that off.
I already enjoyed Elite on the C64 but never got far in that, it was a bit too complex for me as a kid and without any sort of manual I was lucky to merely ship a bunch of computer components to another station... but the core principle really managed to tickle something in my brain to want to dump so much time and money into it, so fair play to Braben/Frontier for doing it 'proper' decades later.
With EDO it's the first time I thought "this is not what I wanted Elite to be", and while the core ship stuff is still part of it, I feel that Frontier will now spend the foreseeable future on the on-foot stuff because that's the money earner now. That is of course their right as the IP owner.
For me I'm quite torn now what to do... playing EDO in its current state isn't very fun for me (it's not unplayable but it is a janky chore more often than not), I hoped for patch 8 to make big steps into the right direction at least performance wise, but that looks like isn't happening now based on the backtracking by Frontier in recent comms, and the gameplay will remain the same regardless for a long time, no new SRV or emotes will change that.
Part of me wants to go cold turkey, quite my forum activity and just uninstall the whole thing (including EDH) because I'm just re-treading the same old activities, and I now question the point of doing so other than just for the sake of it, and post miserable posts here. It really is a habit now where you think you will enjoy it but when you log in you don't really. But what if update 9 introduces something major? Or perhaps update 11? It's all quite pathetic in a way writing all this but that's the emotional investment I was referring to. Mental eh, quite literally!
