I've treated many games in early access like normal games and had lots of fun - which I would call successful purchases. To me EA means that not all content is there, the game is unfinished but playable. It works better for some games than others:

Timberborn in EA was playable completely and since its a sandbox, hard to notice missing content. Similar with Factorio, Valheim and Rust (I actually miss EA Rust a bit).

Hades, Baldur's Gate 3 were story heavy games so they did rely on being complete. Maybe a little less so for Hades. They were good experiences, but I kept playing them at a minimum and waited for full release.