My understanding - second hand, to be fair - is that the space ships do not actually exist in game. It's more like a promise that they will make you a badass space ship when the game's done.

I would say most of them exist now, not all though. Another misconception is that there's nothing "to show" for all this money yet, but they have been maintaining a playable alpha for years now and the development has been very open, detractors love to neglect the huge body of information that's available on the game's development to understand the situation better. It's one of the best multiplayer space games to play already, more content than some fully released games.

This is incorrect. There may be exceptions but ships that are bought exist in game and can be used right away.