Different per company, of course. Many projects that do ship get effectively "cancelled" a bunch of times before shipping (industry people use "pivot" sometimes but its the same thing, really) Thats why some games that have been in development for 5 plus years come out and it looks like its had maybe 2 years of development (FFXV, Diablo 3, etc)
At EA, a game doesnt enter production until its greenlit, and getting greenlit is a big deal because thats when you start moving serious amount of resources, setting dates and spending money on building the team. Tons of games get "cancelled" before getting greenlit and this SW project was probably one of them. The stages between the beginning of a project and getting greenlit are many and its hard to say how much work is being put into any one of those stages, could be a number of prototypes, a vertical slice, maybe some proof of concept videos ... really depends on the team itself. Dead Space is infamous because the team basically built a very thorough, very expensive vertical slice before getting greenlit which .. well in theory its a very bad idea because of the risk involved and the precedent it set But it definitely worked out for them.
So yeah, people certainly have their EA bias but this is in no way uncommon. People always assume a cancelled game would have been good and somehow the publisher is to blame for the cancellation But the reality is that most games get cancelled for -very- good reasons and its a good thing to pivot and change things up before shit gets really expensive