I don’t anyone should preorder. It’s a predatory way to suck a full price of the game or even higher than normal price using often laughably cheap benefits to drum up FOMO.

For me personally, I rarely have interest in brand new AAA games, which are the most guilty of pre-order sales tactics, so the problem more or less solves itself.

Early Access games can be a different story. I’m more willing to throw money at a small studio or solo project that appears to have some passion behind it. Even so I only spend with the mindset that whatever state the game is in might be all I ever get, so match the price to that expectation. I recently played through Deathtrash. It’s unfinished and is historically slow to get updates, however for the $11 I got it for on sale, it had a lot of content and I felt happy with what I got.

Project Zomboid is another example of a “permanently Early Access” game. It might never get out of Early Access but it has so much content now that $20 is a perfectly acceptable price. The history of devs supporting it and the community around it means support for it is unlikely to simply disappear.