Dryspace, you have a very curious attitude towards office work.
Now, I don't think this particular crunch that the CDPR people are going through is sounding like it is all that dreadful, at least not according to what the various people have seen fit to tell us about it. But that applies only to this particular crunch. It doesn't sound like it is all that much additional time, it does sound like it is very time limited, and it does sound like everybody will get compensated fairly.
But that's applicable for this particular crunch. What you're suggesting is that office crunching in general, regardless of situation, is perfectly fine because it happens in an office and office people never work hard anyway. And that is absolute horsie. For starters, office work requires some output. There are some jobs here and there where everything is just process, but mostly you're going to get fired if stuff just piles up on your desk, and you're going to get fired if stuff that leaves your desk is full of errors, particularly if you're in the private sector and your errors are costing money.
In a software development context, you also can't just fall back on routine, because development generally means doing something that hasn't been done already. There's not much point in paying people to build an application that already exists, after all. That's why everybody is simply using Microsoft Office instead of paying local devs to create a spreadsheet application.
And here comes the problem: Without it being routine, with time deadlines, with limits on how many work hours you're allowed to spend, and with harsh consequences if you fuck up, there's actually quite a bit of pressure. You're not always told all the necessary details in advance, and those details can change at any point. You may or may not be given more hours to complete your task if or when that happens. Just have to suck that up.
You may well be forced to use a hopeless design that will cause issues down the line. Your helpful and very interesting commentary to that regard is duly noted and will be taken into account, now proceed and get shit done. You may have to make your task work with barely comprehensible legacy software that has a whole lot of unpredictable behavior. No, you don't get to rework that legacy junk, and since the legacy junk has "worked" for years, any problems it causes in your task are probably your fault.
Are you getting the picture? Because I could go on. Working like this for 40 hours is not physically demanding, most of the time, but it does take a toll. You can't just be mentally asleep and while the work is generally preferable to stacking barrels of toxic waste or similar, it isn't remotely as "fun" as you seem to think.
Finding out why your application is getting a calculation wrong may well involve going through hundreds or even thousands of lines of utterly fucked up legacy code that was seemingly written by 7 different people, that all used different pseudo-encryption for their variable names and used comments as a personal log.
Figuring out how to get something done without breaking other shit, without being horrendously inefficient, without running into refactoring issues may be a bit tricky. And then fucking Karen from accounting calls, or Mark over from marketing, or your boss decides that he just wants an update right now, can't wait, has to be this absolute fucking instant, and blammo, the entire framework that you've stacked up in your mind, all the variables that do this, with these values and those states, is now gone and has to be built up again.
Keep in mind that generally you're not just "working for two hours", you're given a task that should take two hours and will probably take longer. And you're not "done" after two hours, you're "done" when the job is done. Then you get the next task that should supposedly take a few hours, in a perfect world. Then you get the next. In ugly crunch cases, you go from 35-40 hours worth of tasks to 70-80 hours worth. If you think that's no biggie, you're out of your mind.
Next time you have a vacation, try doing sodokus for 10-12 hours straight. You can drink as much coffee as you want. Can't slack off, though. Time your speed for the first 30 minutes. You now have to keep that speed up for the rest of the exercise. What, sounds boring? It's a game! Games are fun! Right?
Yes, we office people did choose this line of work, but that hardly justifies the argument that any conditions are acceptable conditions, anymore than the argument that non-office-workers like you chose to not be highly skilled rocket scientists and therefore you don't need safety measures when moving toxic waste. If you get cancer, so what, you chose that line of work!!
You then go into some of the usual, ahem, imaginations that people on the right seem to have about "the left". I don't know what that is based on and I strongly suspect that this is not the right place to have that discussion. But let me just point out, very briefly, that Europe is generally somewhat far to the left of the US, and most of us tend to laugh quite a bit at the ridiculous hyperbole offered by your right wing people.
Oh, and let me add that Denmark isn't a bad place to be an office grunt. Workers are fairly protected here. But software development bullshit is still bullshit and it still happens, even here.