How much UI polish is actually necessary before your product's first public launch?

On our first launch we rushed out a buggy build following the usual ship fast advice. The feedback was rough and we burned through early leads who lost trust right away.

For our next launch we took an extra month just fixing UI glitches and edge cases. The launch felt smaller but the retention and user response were way better because the core experience actually worked.

Has user expectation gotten too high for raw MVPs, or are founders just overthinking the initial release quality?