They did see the criticism; in fact a lot of it was aimed directly at them. But they thought that they were right.

I did crosspost using a browser.

This exact link was posted here hours ago.

https://lemm.ee/post/2315604

From this Kotaku article:

But fixing Flash-based games isn’t all the team plans to do. It also “took a long, hard look at community feedback on Neopets Metaverse” and NFTs, two recent initiatives which Neopets fans almost uniformly hated. “It quickly became clear that the game just didn’t line up with everything that made Neopets…well…Neopets,” the team wrote. Instead, the team is abandoning that venture (thank god), and focusing instead on an upcoming mobile game called World of Neopets, “a social life-simulation game in which you live your ideal Neopian life from the perspective of a Neopet.”

and

The devs promised that World of Neopets will not just be a rebranding of the maligned Neopets Metaverse. “There are no NFTs in World of Neopets, and the game is NOT built on a crypto model,” they wrote. Blessings!