We can speculate whether overwork is related to Prince's drug addiction and eventual death.
So yeah, failing to rest properly does have bad consequences.
So yes, overworking does create a race to the bottom.
To pop up a level, your comparison is very bad. In Twitter's case, the "model" behavior is that engineers are working longer hours, and not whether they are producing better results. A better analogy would be a sports player who trained extra hard and extra long, but didn't improve their level of play, but still all other players were expected to work extra long hours anyways.
Don't turn our field into one where you have to sacrifice your personal life to succeed.
I'm glad you think I have that much power! Seriously I'm not suggesting any such thing. But why shouldn't people who work harder reap the benefits. And more to the point, does that cause a race to the bottom?
Michael Jordan might be a great example though, he worked harder then anyone else, and ALSO raised the standard of how hard people needed to work on the team beyond the normal limits.
They all did benefit from the Championships that followed, but it was certainly also a strain of the mental health of players like Dennis Rodman.
Why isn't he a good example? He worked hard and wrote a bunch of good music. He didn't seem to cause a race to the bottom.
I thought Band Mates was the best comparison, because we were talking about fellow employee's suffering at a company. And if your comparison was of Prince to The Music Industry at large, it sort of works, but sort of doesn't because other musicians are Prince's competitors not team mates.