Can you afford to not work at the peak of your intellect?

I tried the whole busting ass thing in my early years as a freelancer. I bombed, my output went down with no correlation to working hours whatsoever, I developed obvious markers for anxiety and it took years to get away from that.

Maybe if your job consists of answer dumb emails every day, but there's indeed a very limited number of productive, concentrated work you can get done during the day.

Most of the people who claim to work excessive amounts of overtime waste a humongous amount of time on meetings, confirmations, transportation and phone calls. If anything, they might have a mission and purpose that helps them stay up.

But to pretend that you can crank out code like a machine all day every day is the biggest greatest farce of our profession.

Well, given that, in the vast majority of cases, busting your ass for a startup doesn't get you anything (either the company still fails, or your equity gets dilluted to shit and you lose money compared to what you would have had working a normal job with normal hours over that time period), even if you're not a "top programmer", it doesn't make sense.

I think the more common ground here is that _all_ very successful people are outliers regardless if they work "hard" or not.

That may be that case, but the more relevant question is whether non-outliers can benefit from hard work. DHH says no (because he's a biased outlier, in my opinion). I would say it's far from clear.