Right, I mean secret crush seems like a real improvement over the status quo in its ability to discover potential relationships without risking making existing friendships awkward.

You would think. Those of us who have been wasting time on the internet for long enough remember the Secret Crush Meme from LiveJournal [1], which worked just like this. It was great up until someone realised they could just say they had a crush on everyone they knew to get a list of who had crushes on them, without any genuine reciprocity of the crush.

If you could figure out a way to make it somehow costly to falsely say you have a crush on someone, this might work, but until then, this is game-theoretically wince-inducing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_matching

Generally speaking for 99%+ of people, You shouldn’t have more than a few crushes at once. And they shouldn’t change that often. That would’ve curbed that a lot without restricting many people

Maybe just limit the number of people you can have a crush on at once.