There's not "literally less" than 500 players in this game, if you want to look at Steam charts, then your argument is purposely flawed to create a false narrative. Steam makes up less than 1/5 of the players I found in the last 5 days I've been playing the game, the majority of the playerbase are from EGS and Playstation, and they far outnumber the Steam players for this game, SPECIALLY the Playstation side of the community.
If we are to take the fact that Steam players make up around 1/10 of the active playerbase seeing how rare they are to find, that would mean that the game has at least 2k+ players at the moment.
Also, Illfonic has ALWAYS been neglectful when it comes to this game. Lack of proper weapon variety, lack of new gamemodes, lack of bug fixing and communication, this isn't a new feeling, it's been there since the first few months of release, also they have continuously failed to follow their promises, Captured is just JH, to the point he uses the exact same assets, which goes against their "no preorder content avaliable to other people" bs, and they also failed to deliver all the promised War Paints in time.