> so that HMs have more options of who to fire
Totally true, I don't deny that. But that's not the same as hire to fire, in the context of how it's commonly understood and criticized: that the person that was hired will also be the same person who is going to get fired. My point is that while it's unfortunate that someone will get fired, it's not necessarily the same person who was last hired.
One way to interpret that is that you are literally hiring someone just to fire them.
Another way, the way I and some others are using it, is that they're hiring people *so that* they *have* people to fire. As in, they're not necessarily firing the people they hire, but that they need to hire so that they have options when they need to fire.
I don't think the latter is any better than the former because they're still going about hiring with the explicit intention of firing people. Maybe it's not the hire specifically, but when they have that intention, it still creates the same kind of toxic environment.
Collusion between BRs and HMs is not the fundamental argument here. That was just speculation by someone else trying to poke holes in the argument that HMs do not hire just to fire. The fundamental argument is that the policies lead to perverse actions by HMs.
> All this talk about how bad orgs behave this or that way is not relevant considering that they were exceptionally thoughtful about how to separate the hiring decisioning from firing decisioning.
As has been discussed in many other comments, the separation of concerns here does not prevent the perverse action of hiring more people with simply so that HMs have more options of who to fire.