A quick timeline here:

Krafton forced the removal of 3 top executives of Unknown Worlds and replaced them with one of their own. https://unknownworlds.com/en/news/subnautica-community-letter

One of the executives speaks out implying that their removal had something to do with a disagreement in when the game would be released: https://xcancel.com/Flayra/status/1941316326833914148

Unknown Worlds announced that the early access release of Subnautica 2 was being delayed until 2026.
https://unknownworlds.com/en/news/subnautica-2-coming-2026

Bloomberg released an article this morning about a $250M bonus that Krafton would have paid out to the Unknown Worlds development team if their sales had met a certain threshold sometime this year.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-09/krafton-delays-subnautica-2-game-ahead-of-250-million-payout

A change.org petition has been started in lieu of the recent news: https://www.change.org/p/save-subnautica/