So many people with this idea that Crunch is some kind of Indentured Servitude or the virtual enslavement of Post Industrial Workers circa 1890s.
Unlike building a road, which as a pretty standard formula, a game has occasions where a perfectly valid solution does not meet the ever changing requirements. Often, you don't know that there is an issue until the work has completed and you have to make the decision to take another go at it.
Games are less like roads and are more like a work of fine art. Its only done when it's actually done. The problem isn't that developers don't know this, it's that they know this while at the same time having to deal with very real budgets and production deadlines.
As for "crunch", more often than not, it's not so much that game developers are being beaten with whips or that the shop foreman is walking around with his hired goons to make sure that nobody is out of line while trying to meat unreasonable demands. Rather, it's that you have a team full of craftsman and artists trying desperately to create a piece of work that is very much associated with their sense of pride. They work long hours not because if they don't, they and their desperate families will be forced out of the company town with nothing but the shirts on their back, starving to death while they travel 100 miles to the next company town looking for work. Rather, it's a labor of love and a job in which they are incredibly passionate about that drives them to sleep under their desks if it means that they will get the opportunity to work on something that they feel expresses their creativity accurately.
Oh and that it makes the company they are working for god awful amounts of money.
Now if they are doing this without appropriate compensation, there's nothing keeping them locked to their desks. They can, very often, quit and find work in a related field that will continue to pay them much more money and at which they can just leave the work "at the office".