"saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people" is pretty much the textbook definition of marketing in general. I'm not sure why one might expect the marketing for gaming generally or this game in particular to be any different.

There are a many successful games companies and marketers in the games industry that have enough respect for others to not mislead like this. Many many marketing promotions go to significant effort to show how a thing actually works. There is a great interview with the Battlefield Bad Company people pre-release showing off destructible buildings where they go into what it is and what it isn't, and explain the trade-offs they had to make and how it makes the experience immersive.

> Obviously NMS's original marketing was bonkers and capitalised on saying technically true things in ways to mislead large numbers of people.

I don't think they intentionally misled people. It's not that different to how Spore was marketed during development - a wildly-overconfident dev team promised a living breathing simulated universe, and at some point they had to actually ship the portion they had managed to get working, and most of the complex systems landed on the cutting floor to meet the final deadline.

Spore was similarly misleading, yes.

Having subsequently met a few folks who worked on Spore, I'm pretty sure they fully believed in the early vision they showed off a year or so before release