What you're referring to is bad project management and sometimes unrealistic timelines, but timelines that have been agreed to none the less.
You have no idea what I do for work, so my suggestion would be to be cautious here, because you have no idea what you're talking about.
You guys and I'm talking to you and ignoring the other guy who is a clown, have no idea what the publisher goes through to get a game launched and focus only on the developer as the poor lost lamb.
The reality is it takes a village to ship a game and it takes project management. The reason why crunch happens so often in the industry is that games aren't well project managed. People get big eyes and big stomachs and they take on more than they can chew. Scope creep pushes you further and further and further out of the original plan.
Hey if we give the player this mechanic, it'll put the game over the top. Is it in our original plan? How long will it take? 6 weeks. Okay, we can make up for that along the way. Wait... it's taking us 4 months? Now we're behind schedule and we'll get crucified if we use crunch...
Meanwhile, you've booked tv ad time and youtube, tik tok, Instagram ad buys for October, November, and December, that are non refundable or refundable for a large fee, you have no other game to launch in that time frame so if you delay the game, that ad buy is lost forever. Meanwhile, you still need to pay 150 people for 6 more additional months on the game, while you can't fully go into production on your next game because while you cant get out of the conceptual phase because there are no engineers available because they're busy fixing the last game or maybe it's mostly contractors who you had to extend for 6 months, so maybe it's going to cost an extra 5.6 to 10 million dollars on top of what you've already spent, plus an additional 20 million in advertising. So maybe you need sell an extra 700K units to even break even on the delay and no guarantee from your developer that the 6 months of delay time is going to fundamental resolve the issues you're seeing.
But yes, go on and tell me more and more about how it is JUST the publisher's fault.