Yeah, absolutely.

A company finds itself in a situation where it needs to reduce headcount for reasons. Do you a) just role the dice and randomly pick who goes? or b) Have managers rank their performers and use it to get rid of the lower performers or protect their most valuable people? In a case like this is means some variation of "you're too expensive for what you do for us."

some companies have a policy to layoff the bottom x% of "lowest performers" so yes it is possible to be laid off for performance reasons.

For example "The bottom 10% of salesmen by sales volume"