Countless things people waste money on (and time), but only pre-ordering games is targeted as a problem?
Countless other things are more important than forum debates and video games, yet here you are. See where that train of thought goes?
TFD with preordering is the culture in producing games it's helped create. People are voting with their wallets by not preordering, which is what we're supposed to do if we want to have any impact on this industry that we partake in.
It'd be like you taking an interest in the lack of grocery stores in your area and someone going "Kids are starving in Africa, what's your big complaint about an endless supply of readily available food."
And (sadly in this example) the vast majority of people don't care (like most people really don't care about starving people in africa or all the trash and pollution that comes out of china and poorer nations since I never see anyone campaign for any of that or protesting the trash from china's rivers or protesting about giving food to africa or much of any of that). Most people really don't care sadly in the grand scheme of things, but a small group does.
But to gaming...
Its like the same people that are on reddit that always hate EA, but EA still sees vastly more success than one would think by reading reddit. Think its like 5% of gamers even use forums or reddit at all, more use facebook but most gamers just mind their own business and do what they want...avoid a game, pre-order a game, buy an early access game, whatever it happens to be.
I saw on captain america sub-reddit when the first movie came out, all of the subreddit was gonna boycott the movie for some reason. Forgot why. Movie ended up a massive success, but if one went by reading that sub-reddit you'd think it was the majority of people.
There'll be those who never pre-order, but as seen by the top sells on GOG, amazon and steam (not sure where else didn't look past that)...cyberpunk 2077 is hitting top sold list on those 3 sources. That means the people saying "pre-ordering is ruining gaming" or "don't pre-order games!" are really a vast minority.
To sum it up, my point is people waste their money on countless things...but its the persons choice to waste it or not or spend it on whatever they want as long as its legal. If its illegal, they have the freedom to do that but high risk going to prison. But pre-ordering games isn't illegal, so people are free to pre-order or not to pre-order. Its laughable though on reddit how anyone who pre-orders a game often gets heavily downvoted and a bunch hate them for it. I said I pre-ordered AC Odyssey back before it was released and some dude went on a huge rant how I need to kill myself and stop destroying gaming...he got banned for the first part, but it did make me laugh how he thought pre-orderers were the bane of the world lol.