It certainly didn’t help. The CRA isn’t the only contributor, but without many of the 1995 changes it’s likely that getting into this mess would have been a lot harder.
And it DID provide incentives, alebit in a negative way. Banks that failed to comply with the act faced fines, penalities, and rejection of expansion opportunities. The end result was that banks made loans that they were going to make anyway, but now had to include a larger number of risky loans in order to earn a good rating and avoid penalties. It also expanded the applicable areas for CRA funds, which sort of obviated the whole point of CRA - to increase home ownership in low income neighborhoods.
So while it’s not totally to blame, it sure helped make things worse than they needed to be.