Rockstar didn't receive "similar" criticism. They got some fallout over that interview, but the whole issue was very much forgotten the moment the game was released and everybody was just fawning over all the details.
At that point working conditions at Rockstar became a side-topic barely mentioned in reviews and discussions about the game, if at all.
While with CP2077 CDPR at least tried to do better, they set for themselves the goal not to crunch, take the time the game needs, they were not in the press giving interviews glorifying crunch as something awesome and necesseary.
Which for such an ambitious project was aiming very high, maybe naively so, but at least they tried. Yet currently the majority of discourse around the game is dominated by what an evil company CDPR is for still having to put in crunch. To such a degree where mentioning anything positive about the game will trigger responses talking about "slave labor". Which often is, quite uncynically, followed up with "Just look at Rockstar, that's how you make a proper open-world game!", a lot of eating the cake while still wanting to have it.
So what's the lesson here? That crunch is only bad if the resulting product ain't an unmitigated Rockstar style success?
> (lynching) It overwhelmingly refers to hate crimes along the basis of race or religin.
It overwhelmingly refers to the practices by Charles Lynch punishing loyalist supporters of the British during the American Revolutionary war, which had nothing to do with race or religion. Colloquially used it refers to citizen vigilante justice, and that's very much how a lot of this CDPR hate feels like.
> CD Projekt is a corporation worth billions of dollars that is being called out for treating its employees poorly.
CDPR is not even worth half a billion, they are a dwarf compared to actual billion dollar corporations like Take2, Ubisoft, EA or Activision Blizzard.
CDPR also has pretty much the best pro-consumer practices track-record out of all of them, releasing AAA titles with not even as much DRM as a serial; Just an executable anybody could copy and distribute.
They don't sell single-player games with predatory MTX as all the aforementioned publishers do, even for single-player games.
They at least tried to make an commitment to less crunch and taking their time, until the realities of investor financing forced their hand.
Yet apparently none of that is worth any goodwill, nor do labor-rights at companies like Ubisoft, EA or ActiBlizz really factor in any of these discussions right now, even tho they also just released massive games that very likely involved crunching to get them out of the door.
I would understand this whole situation if they all faced criticism like that, particularly the actual billions dollar worth corporations, but that's not happening: Ubisoft and ActiBlizz get a complete pass, while CDPR is made out to be the new EA of the industry.