I'll reply to both of these at once.
The purpose of my post was to put something a little less speculative out there. The full context is in the public Patreon post, but Atemsiel would, be reason/logic of his past involvement with Companion of Darkness, fall into one of the categories listed by Invader Gary.
Atemsiel and Berkili4 are good friends outside of development (
https://thef95zone.info/threads/companion-of-darkness-s2-ch-10-berkili4.154533/post-15287259). So while this isn't definitive, I thought I'd make a comment based on what information we do have. Gary didn't name Atemsiel, but Berkili4 doesn't appear to want to revisit the Chapter 10 animators, which flags the reliable dev as most likely being Atemsiel.
The only other read, if he's not the one with health issues, would be what Gary said ("every animator he found either wasn't interested, or asked absurd prices").
As to the 'copium' part of it: I like the unknowns and the story of the game, but I'm not that taken with it. I don't like the universe it's set in, and the biggest draw for me was Atemsiel had a 'play it your way' approach (where you could ditch your actual job more or less as much as you wanted). The degree of freedom was nice in a setting/domain that has been overdone a bit. At the end of all of that, I was just trying to provide information because people may miss it, or not put it together. Sure, it's possible it's not Atemsiel with health issues, but I can't really see him fitting into the other categories all that well either, and health issues would track with the delays.