From personal experience: yes I know people who follow this schedule. I don't personally. I will work 12+ hours straight if I really need to crunch, but generally working like that negatively affects the quality of your output, and I don't see a general improvement in the quality of others when they work like this.

Proving once again that we are a fad-driven industry of trend-chasers who have no clear understanding of what generates value.

I keep ahead of everyone by working 9 days a week, 96 hours a day.

Been in SV culture most of my life. I do think by and large this only existed around 2004ish to 2010ish.

These days it's a new form of work virtue signalling mostly created by people that do something more like 3 3 18 3 1 8 0

996 are existed for a long long time. Heck I've done 12 12 7 during my teen years in summer vacation.

It's not a big deal. It's just startups doing their thing and the press capitalizing on views with headlines.