EA was famously sued ~20 years ago for not paying overtime. They lost and had to reclassify roles to non-exempt and paid up. It impacted hiring decisions for non-exempt/hourly roles (especially QA), encouraged more outsourcing, but this didn't eliminate crunch then, and it hasn't eliminated it since.
That's really my point: overtime-paid crunch is still found all over the place. EA, Activision-Blizzard, Sony's studios, Com2uS, 343 Industries (even with "priority zero"), outsourcing groups like Keywords Studios... They all have crunch stories but they also all make use of both overtime-paid roles and exempt salaried roles during crunch time. If overtime pay eliminated crunch, we'd expect to see a stronger separation in overtime-eligible workers not experiencing crunch, and crunch concentrating entirely in exempt roles. Instead, crunch appears in both.
Furthermore, over the last 20 years, crunch has decreased in both. I think that's better explained by things that directly affect the underlying reasons for crunch like changes to production practices (i.e. patching instead of going gold) and better management practices (i.e. less waterfall methodology). On indirect pressures, it's a broader mix with competition from the rest of tech, cultural backlash against crunch, and sure overtime classification changes. Explicit overtime pay increases the cost of crunch and thus incentivizes figuring out how to reduce it, but it doesn't directly reduce it itself, and certainly doesn't eliminate it.
At least in this case non-exempt employees are getting compensated for their extra hours. That seems more fair; the company gets what it needs, but has to pay for it.
Reclassifying people as exempt in order to eliminate OT pay is a garbage move, though. Something unionization presumably could fix.
Certainly exempt FTEs are crunching and not getting (directly) compensated for it. But the above comment's "overtime pay makes crunches disappear" claim is also simply not the case, just given the still-present abundance of crunch time for non-exempt employees who do get overtime pay.
When management needs to pay more for crunch then it will prove whether the deadline is real or fake. eg. If we don't meet this deadline will it materially affect the business... or is it not really needed and it's better to save on the overtime pay.