It's not locked, but you have to consider people who financially support dev's work, so they have the advantage of experiencing new features firsthand before non-paid users
The "never lock content behind paywall" refers to the fact, that everything that is currently in paid build will eventually end up as a public release, he meant that there won't be a feature that will be exclusively available to subscribers and not to free users
development takes time, all is done by moondev alone and only, since people are paying him to develop the game, they are his priority
if you don't pay, you don't get to have demands, you can only patiently wait until it becomes accessible to public