They bet on projects but those projects didn't pan out, every company does this, every hire is a gamble. Even a cafeteria that hires a new person assumes future demand will keep up or increase, if that prediction was wrong the person will not be needed and will be laid off, that is just how business works.

This is much better than the "you get what you use" resource allocation where organizations never shrinks, we want them to shrink when they don't have any useful work to do.