Why would you lay off an entire team for a product pivot? Unless all of the company's other products are fully staffed... how often does that ever happen?

They could have done it on the division level. Pad your org with a relatively useless team just before the forced 10% layoff and you've dodged the bullet.

Are you trolling? You're accusing management of onboarding an H1-B, paying a sign-on bonus, paying relocation expenses and then paying them for 2 months to surreptitiously "pad the relatively useless team" so you can initiate a layoff instead individual firings. Nope. Generally, firings at big corp go like this: 1. Create an improvement plan for your under-performing worker. 2. Evaluate worker based on that plan in 1 month. 3. Fire worker.

When you have several layers of middle management trying to sabotage one another in pursuit of better chances at the next reorg, even weirder things could happen. Been there myself.