Crunch is terrible, and a failure of management. When things turn from "crunch up to a date" to a "crunch to a repeatedly moving date", it's referred to as a "death march".

They are a structural, repeated, and complete failure of project management. https://www.polygon.com/2020/12/4/21575914/cyberpunk-2077-release-crunch-labor-delays-cd-projekt-red

The nomenclature should tell you everything you need to know about how destructive these situations are to the people who go through them. In the industry, the common management bandaid solutions to a death march are called things like "throwing bodies at the problem".

In these situations we don't even expect everyone to get through unscathed. It's like management calculates the amount of churn, of burnout, of careers, relations, happiness that will be lost and goes "well, that's not too big a sacrifice to undo the damage of our incompetence".

Obviously, the solutions don't necessarily work. Crunch lowers productivity and increases the amount of errors made. In complex software, crunch doesn't translate to polish, it translates to bugs, instability, and log errors that everyone misses in their bleary-eyed 3AM check-up.

It remains absolutely absurd that the health of those who work on games isn't a top priority of everyone who makes, discusses, and plays games.

I don't know how good Cyberpunk 2077 will be, or how buggy, but I do know no matter what, it wasn't worth a single dev burning out.