From experience, crunch time is like any other job where you oversee projects and have fires come up, tbh. It happens on almost every industry one way or another, under different labels.
On software development specifically, it's far from being just on the gaming industry. It's just more visible there because we corner ourselves a bit with release dates and all that jazz, but there's really always deadlines.
The internet has helped a lot in this regard too, the fact that you can have day 1 patches have also helped to relieve some of the pressure.
As far as working on the industry, the big factor is where, IMO. It's extremely compe ive, and every game is a huge gamble in a lot of ways. The barrier to entry is pretty high, and in this day and age, marketing is probably as big a factor as the product itself if you want the numbers to work.