Many would say that if the company only had to lay off 6% they were taking "reasonable" risk.
Compare to say Luno who had to cut 35% of staff: https://techcabal.com/2023/01/26/luno-layoffs/
Counter: What's better for morale, your project to get stopped now and cut and you re-prioritized or let go, or a slow bleed through the year where no new headcount get put on the project as people leave for you to eventually find out in a year that management knew and kept you on that project aimlessly to "avoid a layoff"?
Personally, I'd prefer the former, as the latter would give me a lot more doubt for future projects
Not every job is fungible so you may end doing some small scale hiring and let a few people go. But that’s normal and occurs outside of large scale layoffs.
Layoffs aren’t companies tossing risks, they’re companies offloading risk to their workforce.
That would be a terrible move. The people who change jobs are generally the ones with better options. If you just do attrition you'll end up losing only the good people and you have no control over which projects / departments you starve of resources.
The best people leave when conditions deteriorate not simply because you have a smaller workforce. Shuffle people between projects and scale back workloads as you scale back the workforce and nothing seems wrong.
It’s true not all jobs are findable so you’re going to need some onboarding and to let a some people go but that’s just a normal part of business.
Large scale layoffs require companies to be caught completely by surprise which is a huge management failure. The point of upper management is to steer the boat not run into an iceberg.