"the company had appointed advisors to review and pursue various transformational strategic and capitalistic options to extract the best value for stakeholders".
Companies should focus on extracting the best value for consumers not stakeholders... when it was created the stoke market was supposed to be disconnected from real economy to prevent that situation where companies tries to give priority to the stakeholders (who don't produce anything and don't increase GDP) over consumers. When that rule started being ignored in the beginning of the XX century and provocked the 1929 krack they should have take it at a warning and stop doing that instead of continuing that heresy.
Are delays not good? It's preferable to being broken on launch, not to say that it couldn't be, but it's likely that it would be more broken if not delayed.
When a game gets delayed it's not a good sign in general. It means "the game is broken and we can't release it as it is".
Of course a delayed game will be better than a game that needed to be delayed and released anyways instead, but realistically speaking you can't fix a broken AAA sized game in one or two months.
Add this to the fact that Ubisoft (rightfully so) earned a bad reputation among players as time went on, and that devs can't work at their best when they are crunching and they fear to be laid off, and you'll understand why non-casual gamers don't have faith in the game.
They're not saying it but I think it's likely this is because of all the big games coming out in February. Civ 7, Avowed, and Monster Hunter Wilds are the three big ones and those take up a lot of time. Shadows would get lost in the weeds. Meanwhile there isn't really a big game coming out in March. So perfect time.