I think this is cool and in my opinion has nothing to do with the workaholic culture.
I never did a deliberate 120 week, but I can attest that when I constantly do >12 hour days for a limited(!!) period my focus was much better. While there may be a cognitive decline because of the hours I believe there is a positive counterbalance when you do not need to worry about food, emails, laundry or any mundane tasks and basically you never unload the problem from your head. For certain type of coding tasks that gives much more than what is removed because of the tiredness.
This is something like an ironman. You can do it a few times, it puts you into a zen state, but obviously you don't run an ironman every day or every week of your life.
I never did a deliberate 120 week, but I can attest that when I constantly do >12 hour days for a limited(!!) period my focus was much better. While there may be a cognitive decline because of the hours I believe there is a positive counterbalance when you do not need to worry about food, emails, laundry or any mundane tasks and basically you never unload the problem from your head. For certain type of coding tasks that gives much more than what is removed because of the tiredness.
This is something like an ironman. You can do it a few times, it puts you into a zen state, but obviously you don't run an ironman every day or every week of your life.