It seems pretty obvious that Elon Musk acted as ablative armor for tech company layoff criticism and stock devaluation and the confidence snowballed.

I think so too. Elon laid waste to Twitter devs & SRE and that has allowed other companies to feel it's ok now.

But that's not the whole thing - it sounds like there was massive over-hiring of devs and some madness of trying to stop other companies getting them.

What a wasteland. The thing is there is a whole raft of interesting jobs out there that don't involve actively making society worse, so hopefully some devs will move out of this scene and onto something more constructive.

Two thoughts:

1. Twitter works. The cuts are reasonable.

2. I worked with a number of people from (pre-Musk) Twitter. The self entitlement culture the majority of these pre-Musk Twitter people espoused was toxic.

Define "works?"

Site is up and it seems they've launched more features in the last year than the previous 15 years combined.

Ridiculous. It clearly functions as well as ever.

Right... And the reports documenting increased down time, broken features and spam on the "for you" page are all a false flag operation by the liberal woke mafia to dunk on daddy Elon.

You define it cause you seem to be quite confused about what that word should mean.

That's not how making a claim in good faith works buddy.

Clearly so, but doesn't it kind of blow open some serious questions -- these companies have been over-hiring and importing direct competition from the third world to our labor, and now they say "lol jk, we didn't need that labor"?

Hmm....

Whether it's correct or not depends on the goal. This rule (and others requiring the amortisation of certain expenditures) means that companies need to keep more cash than actually needed for operations.

For a change that doesn't even change tax obligations/revenue, just shifts portions of it in time.

I'm aware of why amortisation/depreciation exists in the accounting context; I haven't found a rationale for requiring it in taxes in general, or for this case in particular. Especially for things that were paid for with cash.