It's sad and repulsive that there are people with such a cultish devotion to capitalism that they admire this behavior and culture.
Well run companies do all nighters, and aren't so cultishly devoted to a "work life balance" that implies 4 hour workdays on slack.
Well run companies also understand sustainability. Max effort will need to be demanded to exceed current capacity, but it is important not to rely on it as a crutch to get past poor design, poor process, or other management misfires.
This is something games are seeing now, most of the industry luminaries cut their teeth in an era where the whole game fit on one disk. They assume that the weekend long anger coding to bash that one bug is the same as what they're asking their company to do.
I made the comment about slackers because having moved from retail to military to tech, the amount of privilege shown unironically by tech employees on "crunch" is borderline unbelievable.
I think there's a valid point hidden in your insane comment: there is a competitive advantage to abusing your staff, so it's really up to governments to force companies not to. Things like reasonable holiday allowance. Good statutory sick pay. The EU working time directive (which was sadly made optional but it at least set the tone).
All of that is missing in the US which is presumably why companies there don't hesitate to push people as hard as they want.
That’s actually the law in some countries. It’s not really enforced much, but the idea is that you have a weapon to sue your company if they prevent you from taking 2 weeks off once a year.
Well run companies have adequate resourcing so that staff don't need to work all night
Think of the holidays for retail - do you pay 2 to 3x the employees year round to support the November to December shopping season?
If you did that, you would be very silly.
Conditions will frequently demand that an "adequately resourced" company has to run overtime to take advantage of an opportunity, beat a competitor to a new feature, or other such situations. This happens all the time.