I work in the games industry and have been doing game jams for a few years now - mostly Ludum Dare which is 72 hours.
The crunch is certainly real and I now always take a day off work to recover rather than letting my work suffer, but the payoff of experience and the end result of having made a game is amazing. It's also a great opportunity for self reflection on how you spend your time working on projects. Jams reinforce the fact that code doesn't need to be meticulously designed to work and art doesn't need to be well polished to be aesthetically pleasing. It's easy to get lost in bureaucracy of and standard practices in professional game development, so I find game jams wonderfully refreshing :)
Life is ultimately a game of risk/reward and for me personally being fatigued for a few days after a jam is worth it.
That being said, here's a shameless plug of what I sacrificed sleep to make haha
https://itch.io/jam/gmtk-2019/rate/462790
