If you ever wondered why very few animated movies look as good as Across the Spider-Verse...
According to people who worked on the sequel, Across the Spider-Verse, it’s because the working conditions required to produce such artistry are not sustainable. Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.
It was an amazing film, so the methods worked.
There's a fallacy from implication there: just because the film ended up being really good does not mean these methods were the only way the film could have been good. It's not a zero sum game, you can make excellent movies and also not exploit your workers to do it. You just have to be humble enough to take another few months to finish it, a relatively small price to pay for treating your employees with decency.
Big difference between a job and a project. Projects will have crunch time. Relentless revisions is going to drive any team mad - but this director looks like they were striving for perfection and they made a fantastic film. Project work is not for everyone. Just quit if its not the environment you enjoy, but some people like to strive for that, and yes, time matters otherwise you become star citizen.
I work in the media industry. Yes, sometimes there are times when you have to work like hell. But it shouldn't be this way by default and expecting people to work insane hours to compensate for a lack of planning is stupid, unnecessary and burns out your team. If you really think like this, you're the kind of person I would never want to work with.
By the sounds of the article the director didn't understand how to plan for 3D animation - which just makes them a bad director who made others spend time fixing their mistakes.