Perhaps. But in my experience as an engineer, there is a widespread human tendency to take requests into a cave and not come out until something too 'opinionate

Perhaps. But in my experience as an engineer, there is a widespread human tendency to take requests into a cave and not come out until something too 'opinionated' is built. When creating for/with others, often what is preferred is a 'dialogue' approach, because everyone has an opinion on what to build. If a product manager asks you to build a Twitter clone, which you reply would take a year, and they counter with 'you've got two days', then make a 2-day Twitter clone. You might build just a couple of key interactions, and it might only operate at toy-scale, or you might just write a bunch of stubs that print out what the system would do, but in general, if someone counters in response to your estimate with a request to do it in 1/x of the time, they are usually communicating "I don't need something built to that level, I want a 1/x pass of what you imagine". So really these aggressive deadlines are more about project stakeholder's desire to have more control over the design process. Of course a creator might not want to share control, but that is a different issue to 'being forced to work for free'.