That’s what the guy said. Money isn’t “intrinsically” real - it doesn’t have something in-and-of itself. It’s extrinsically real - it represents something in the society we live in, a system of arbitrage and barterage that we use to represent an amount of work (Poorly, and with little benefit to a large number of people).
So no - if the extrinsic reality changes, then the barter or arbitrage currency will change - bottle caps, for instance, take over. But for a large society to function, a commonly accepted means of representing “value” has to be agreed upon. I can’t just say, “Well, I’ve got the worth of x hours worth of time spent on projects to provide”, instead I’ll say “I’ve got x pounds to provide”.
Originally, this was made more explicit, and it still exists on UK currency: “I promise to pay the bearer…” At that point, the notes had a (Bank-enfornced) intrinsic value. The words meant a promise to provide the currencies face-value in Gold. Now, we’ve done away with gold-backed currency, and the raw value is arbitrary, it has no intrinsic value but that set by extrinsic realities.
They’ve explicitly acknowledge the overpromise in the part of NMS (And, thanks to the continuous, rolling, free and global updates to NMS, have more than delivered on everything they promised and then a load more that they didn’t promise, including next-generation graphical updates, and entire new procedural generation systems that have added even more to the environment).
They’ve gone above and beyond to deliver, I’d even hazard a guess that they’ve over-delivered as far as any bureaucratic or financial director is concerned. They’re working full-time on NMS nearly 10 years on from release! They’ve done enough to warrant a modicum of trust.
I’m not pre-ordering, but I’ll be watching with interest, and will likely buy on day-one.