I felt the same way about the big tech layoffs and hiring freezes in 2008-2009. (Followed by huge, across the board, non-merit based salary boosts in 2010 and a hot job market to follow.)

For the startups maybe it's a different calculus, but for the big guys they're mostly doing fine and it's not really about cutting costs. It's that some group of consensus-makers decided that laying off is the appropriate, responsible, even inevitable trend in business.

Relatedly, when the socially acceptable thing was to over-hire blindly, few people called them out.