In other words, they took the very real risk of needing to fire almost all people they hired during the pandemic again knowingly, because God forbid they missed that percent of growth of they didn't.

The survival risk isn't the percent of growth, it's missing something entirely (which could still happen, of course).

They all sound silly in retrospect but FB has to worry about things like "everyone starts using Zoom because of the pandemic and Zoom adds Chat and Ads and Facebook dies".