Correct, costs have risen and the PEA they use from 2018 +...

Correct, costs have risen and the PEA they use from 2018 + guesswork for adjustments simply doesn't cut it (as we've seen). There's a reason why they never updated the feasibility studies. Everything had blown out massively, capex and opex. They decided not to do updated studies showing this, else it would be impossible to raise anything at all and likely have shown the project is simply too expensive to run economically, without a premium lithium price.

I suppose everyone in "advanced negotiations" saw this and took for the hills.

I believe Pablo said 10ktpa would be US$250m or thereabouts. Realistically, if he said 250, we can say US$300-350m to ramp up. Now that they won't be looking at even 10k for another ~decade, CAPEX will more than likely be much higher in 10 years time.

That I know of, no nano-cap company has raised such amounts for a project ever. So despite JZ telling us they're looking for value proposition in the 10ktpa engineering reports, we know for a fact that there's a slim to no chance of them being able to fund the expansion, therefore engineering reports will be a nice hype for a pump and dump until the market realises there's no actual sustainable shareholder value in them by itself.