Death Stranding is probably in the last stages of development.

I think the term you're looking for is "white-box,"

Everything Kojima has said implies that's the phase they're in, and that could still be years away from a release... but we can hope right? He's definitely not polishing things yet, and you're reading way to much into the statement "how the project is coming together as a whole" that certainly doesn't imply that all the individual pieces are finished. It just means that until you throw all the unfinished pieces into a bowl and mix them up, you won't have any idea how it works together, or how it breaks itself.

Unfortunately it doesn't just go whitebox-->polishing-->release either. There are so many phases between a whitebox and an alpha, and even more phases between an alpha, QA, beta, and release.

/r/DeathStranding Thread