Whether a game takes 2 years to complete Beta, or 12, if the GM phase is cut short, then the game is going to be full of bugs. If porting was rushed, that’s a problem too.
To explain the dev process a little. Usually games are developed across several stages. Standard practice is preproduction, prototyping, first playable, Alpha, Beta, and Gold Candidate. There are various objectives that need to be complete, Alpha is usually signed off on when all major features are in and no crash bugs. Beta when all content is in with no A-class or B-Class bugs: A-class are things like 100% reproducible crashes with relatively easy steps, memory leaks, etc. B-class are things like 5% chance of crash, irregular bugs that lead to blockers, and that sort of thing,. Gold Candidate, you ideally want all bugs cleared, but sometimes executives will override this phase and release a buggy game - this is usually done by ghetto studios and PC devs (who often have shit standards compared to console and other closed platforms with a QA run required. Whether the Beta takes 1 year to complete, or 10 years, rushing through gold candidate is still going to result in a shitty game - and it’s a foolish process to sacrifice time in gold candidate if Beta went over schedule. If Beta goes over, a delay is necessary.
In the end, the executives would be the ones making the decision to rush the GM phase, not the development team. While devs will often offer estimates, the overall schedule is mandated from the top. It would be the top level that would mandate crunch time to make up for rushing the timelines, and they’d be the ones who signed off on the release of an unfinished product. Crunch time is asking for mistakes to happen, rushing release out before bugs are cleared is simply bad practice. I’m actually surprised Sony and Microsoft QA let the game through if it was so problematic.
Anyway, to use an analogy,
Think of Game development like putting together an album, a band might be allowed 2 years to write an album, and for arguments sake, production is allowed 6 months for mixing and polish. If the band takes 2 and a half years, cutting down the production time from 6 months to 1 month to avoid substantial delay will result in a shitty album because it only got 1/6th the production time.