I have no idea what Facepunch does or if they even are doing what you suggest they are doing.
But as to preventing the tactic you describe, ideally you want a steady pace of releasing features and bug fixes - the more frequently the better. Some companies release many times per day, some daily, some weekly, etc. The longer your release cycle, the more you have to test, the more unpredictable the finish line is, and the more likely you are to "cram" at the end (assuming you have a defined date to release on). However, the more frequently you release, the more infrastructure you need. Companies of non-trivial software that release multiple times per day have invested a ton in building up infrastructure and processes to make it happen and they have very large organizations.
Rust is incredibly complex (besides the gameplay, think of all the variations of OS, graphics card, etc. they have to test) and the dev team is small. The fact that they release as much and as often as they do is a testament to their high capability. It's very impressive.
I say this as a developer of non-trivial software, and as a sad Mac user waiting to play again once the crash that occurs at dawn/dusk has been fixed. This bug was introduced in June 2018 and they are at the mercy of the framework they use (Unity). They attempted a fix but it introduced other bugs so they rolled it back. So I get it. Non-trivial software is... non-trivial. I'm cool with them "missing" a date.
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