It is advanced access, however Firaxis did an announcement shortly after release, addressing the rocky release and promising to fix things, where they (accidentally) called it early access. It seems they changed that now, still, it was there (and was made fun of) in forums and other Lemmy like communities.

Civ 7 is Early Access (Firaxis called it like that themselves) and the founders edition is 130 bucks, so I guess this is becoming normalized…