You make great points about the siphoning of talent. Seems to me there is a tipping point where the benefit of hoarding talent get outweighed by the literal dollar cost of having them. As the stock market drops for macro reasons, this line crossed quickly and they looked at cutting staff as better than keeping them. Then once one big tech corp did a layoff, everyone else took a good look at themselves and did the same.

My point is there is no strategy outside of “make line go up”.