It's probably just because of early access that they didn't improve it, because so far there were no quality of life changes nor improvements whatsoever to many aspects of the game.
Inventory management is terribly basic and lackluster, putting items into backpacks causes them not to be registered, proximity dialogue ignoring a character if you're too close to the NPC and so on. Unfortunately so many things need quality of life improvements, which at this point we won't see until the game releases. So I sure hope that between now and release they will be working on improving and making certain aspects more intuitive and user-friendly.
Otherwise these will become major issues upon release for a lot of people. I mean, even now it's a big issue for a lot of people. Quality of life improvements have a huge effect on how a game is experienced.
