For the games I worked on so far, there has been a mix. Alpha used for getting balancing right, and Beta for additional balance pass before release. Sometimes both Alpha and Beta were accessible to all, somtimes Alpha was for pre-orders only and Beta weekends for the rest. Sometimes Beta was the only stage for public testing, and sometimes Alpha was for public testing without an official Beta testing period. It is a mixed bag, to be honest. None of them were perfect at release, but committed dev teams spent time on patching, so the games eventually became good.
This is, sadly, the state with most games nowdays... even single-player games... they are released as a service, rather than a complete product, which means that developers will buy time and money releasing a bit too early (to make the fiscal year, no matter what state the game is in) but then commit to fix most bugs and balancing after release with no additional cost for the customer.
FDev are following the norm, as far as I can tell and I can't blame them for doing so. The positive thing I have with Elite Dangerous is that FDev has a fairly large team committed to make it a good game, and Odyssey isn't an exception to that. I actually rather have FDevs approach to Elite compared to what happened to Anthem.
Anthem was released in a very bugy state in 2019, and now EA and Bioware have confirmed that they will not support it anymore. It is a dead product.
EDIT: Greed is what makes games release too early, imho, and it has zero relation to the developers themselves... it is something that happens above their control.
EDIT2: I might have one exception to that rule and that is Wasteland 3. They kept moving the releasedate.... and even then, they had to do several patches to the game after it was released.... but... the initial release was very solid in most cases.
