It sounds like a textbook case of bad management if no one in the management chain or peer groups for those people can tell whether they're absent. I don't think that's a common situation though. Rather, tech companies have gotten paranoid about information flow regarding layoffs and don't meaningfully incorporate that data into executive decisionmaking. To escape their information vacuum, they instead look to outwardly visible signals like RTO/badge swipes as a substitute for the individualized performance metrics they've firewalled out.