it is literally not. Though it is a requirement of some crimes.
> You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act.
No, you don't, in general. You have to have intended a particular outcome if the particular crime requires that, but plenty of crimes do not have such requirements (or specifically do not apply if intent is present). E.g., “depraved heart” murder, involuntary manslaughter, and any strict liability crime or crime of negligence or recklessness.
Even if intent isn’t written into a specific law, the whole system is built to specifically allow intent to be considered in so many stages. Sometimes they don’t even decide to prosecute.
Laws exists specifically to create a functioning society. Laws do not exist for the sake of having laws. Any sane person enforcing any kind of rule understands this.
This take is like programmers getting angry when businesses don’t care about the quality the the code or something, forgetting that the whole reason people hire programmers is to solve business problems, not to write text on a computer. Total miss of the point of the exercise.
Mental state (which is much broader than intent, though intent is an aspect of it) is an important consideration for criminal law and most offenses have a required mental state (strict liability offenses are a small minority). And mental state is, yes, considered broadly beyond the formal requirements, too.
But to say that “intent is literally the heart of criminal law” is both literally false and substantively misleading.
Intent is literally the heart of criminal law. You have to have intended a crime for it to be a criminal act. In this context, this means that you had to intend to do things that would legally constitute a crime, even if you did not know that the actions/result would be a crime. For some crimes, specific intent is not required for all of the factors (for example, for statutory rape, you do not need to have intended or even known that the other person was underage; for many manslaughter charges you do not have to have intended to kill someone so long as you intended to do things that could reasonably have been expected to cause someone's death).
Intent is also a fundamental factor in tort law, where intentional acts can literally quadruple the amount of damages the plaintiff may receive.
And in contract law, intent is a basic foundational element of a contract. And indeed, a number of contractual disputes arise over one party intending to make money, not actually making money, and suing their counter-party as a result. And many times, the plaintiff wins...
This situation is probably governed by contract law. Since those disputes turn entirely on the specific facts proving or disproving mutual intent, it's hard to say who would win in this dispute since only a small subset of the relevant facts are publicly known.