Once you enable companies with the means and the norm to make people work while they are on the toilet, companies will use them and you won't be able to put the genie back in the bottle.
The idea that the evil corporation can enslave people is, I think, somewhat naive. Certainly, there are companies that don't respect or appreciate an appropriate work life balance. Also, there are certainly employees who are happy to trade an appropriate work life balance for a certain amount of money.
In the field of IT though, companies are frequently seeking out more and more ways to entice workers, and offering to chain them to their desk is seldom an appealing offer in isolation. Chaining someone to their desk for triple the market rate might work, but if it ever stops working as incentive, the employees are free to leave.
I've worked in environments where the work was put first, and the demands of the job are indeed intense. For that sacrifice, I was paid very, very well. When I realized the impact it was having on my personal life, I was no longer willing to make that trade, and opted for a change. Now, I still work hard, but I'm better able to dictate the 'when' and 'where' of it, and am overall more productive. That is a choice that everyone is free to make.
For what it's worth, even in the 'evil' corporation I described, nobody would have bothered to force me into working harder than I wanted. The expectation was just higher, and, I might even dare say, commensurate with the pay. Had I not wanted to work as hard, they wouldn't have pushed it, they would have just lowered expectations of me, and those lowered expectations would have resulted in lower bonuses, lower pay, and perhaps a lower overall regard for my work ethic. It was rather easy for me to just take the pay cut initially rather than draw it out and ruin my reputation in the process.
