Earlier quoted context omitted.
They might actually be printing discs, though. Nowadays, multi-gigabyte day-one patches are commonplace, so all the disk is for is shipping art assets cheaply (and supporting legacy retail sales). So as long as the art assets are 95% done, that’s good enough to “go gold” and start printing.
Nothing says “We don’t give a shit; you gave us your money” quite like having to wait a couple of hours for an update immediately after installing a game.
People who don't give a shit don't crunch after the game has gone gold to make last minute improvements and fix more bugs. People who care do.