1st Year Analyst - What Happens If I Just Stop Caring?

High risk, high reward situation. As a 1st year analyst who recently quit without anything lined up, here's my 2 cents:
It is extremely difficult to network, research, and apply to roles when you're working 100+ hours and your seniors expect you to be online 24/7, and if you are not dead set on what you want to do next (niche industry or specific role) then you will need to do your homework. No one will hop on a networking call with you at 10 pm ET (maybe you're on the east coast and the guy is on the west coast?). While it is risky to quit without anything lined up (believe me, was not an easy decision to make), you increase your chances of landing something nice. Once you give your bank a bs covid related excuse, you won't be burning the bridges. There is a probability, though slim, that your VP might not tolerate you slacking off till your August bonus and might fire you instead. The last thing you would want is your new firm calling your old bank to find out you were fired...
Just bite the bullet..

Haven't done it, but it's very difficult to get fired as an analyst (beyond insider trading, harassment, etc, I think it's actually near impossible). However, I have found that with the way staffings work, it's usually all or nothing. You can't just log off at 10PM or flat out reject staffings without actually dropping the ball and not doing your work. If comments come through at 9:30pm and you log off at 10pm, I imagine it will go very poorly and you'll end up screwing over the entire team. You can just do a consistently mediocre job in the work you do and eventually you'll be staffed on less intense projects, but I could never imagine someone actually just not doing the work. It's a small world and you would be really be letting the team down, so you better hope no one ever calls for a reference if you take this route. Personally I would quit before adopting this strategy-you won't wreck your reputation and you'll have more time to recruit. The other strategy would be to just actually do your job but do baseline level of quality so you aren't put on live engagements and then  commit yourself to recruiting in your free time. 

People are even leaving top banks?? :0 aren't you basically guaranteed a sweet buy side gig in a year??  

This is basically what bottom bucket analysts do anyways. If you're truly set on leaving, I don't see why not tbh. As another user mentioned, it's very difficult to get fired as an analyst as they only need to deal with you for two years and can just relegate you to price updating books. 

I would quit. Off sheet references are way more common and powerful than you think. Better to just quit and cut ties and give COVID as a reason or whatever, than have somebody down the line call your old boss because they were old banker buddies or classmates or something, and then your old boss tells that person you were total shit.

As far as I'm aware, it's employment at will, so they don't even need a reason to fire you.

Whatever you do... Don't drop the ball or fuck the team over. Don't burn bridges. As others have commented, the folks you would fuck over can have a massive influence on your near term job prospects. I've seen it happen twice in the last 12 months. One guy is still unemployed.

I've adopted a slightly similar approach.  Certainly not logging off at 10pm and turning in sloppy work, but I am putting a lot less pressure on myself to be perfect.  Instead of turning my wheels trying to figure something out, I just ask from the get-go. If I was given no guidance on a task, I just turn in quality work based on my interpretation of the assignment with zero guilt.  It helps some with hours, and a ton with mental energy since it makes the job less stressful.