A fun point that I would also temper a bit by saying those work obsessed lunatics do what they do with lots of support from the plebs around them (friends, family, employees).
Work-obsessed lunatics are like that even without 'unreasonable' amounts of profits.
Greed-obsessed lunatics is a different subset ( with overlap ) but play a very different role in societies.
Your view of innovation on The Continent is likely 10% true and 90% PR. You just don't think about innovations as European because we don't put faces on companies.
At the very least if someone chooses to work day and night to build, society should be celebrating them— not discouraging them. It may be bad from their perspective, but civilization as a whole cannot advance without people like this. All of the rest of us are free-riding off people like this both past and present.
I think it’s really great the European culture of la vita dolce. But the reality is virtually all new products and companies come from places with less cultural aversion to working nights and weekends than The Continent.