Counterpoint: software developers aren't necessarily well paid or highly regarded everywhere, since remote working for companies abroad hasn't quite gotten mainstream enough.
So it might just be effective against some people, or in cases where the hiring process itself has become increasingly unreasonable - the job being working on boring CRUD apps but the hiring process being multiple stages of Leetcode and complex interviews.
That's probably not applicable to everyone since plenty of folk can grokk Leetcode and find jobs without too much trouble, but i still recall "The Unseen 99%" article: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...
It probably applies to the industries and companies where devs are treated as a cost center and since those companies aren't all out of business, plenty of people must be working in such environments, with sometimes sub-optimal conditions.
Could you elaborate? What kind of fear? “You’re fired”? I wonder how effective it actually is because of the current job market and also because I (and others) react very poorly to this kind of tactics: “you want me to fear getting fired? Joke’s on you, please DO fire me, I dare you”