This was rather clumsily written. Even if your company messed up, shoving your CEO with a boot up his ass is bad for morale. The reason why most communiques are generic is because there's very little upside to being abrupt publicly.
You are quite wrong, if anything, employees appreciate openness and decisiveness, vs. sweeping changes under the rug with generic language. There is actually a ton of upside to creating honest communication, but it's much harder than hiding behind empty phrases, which then builds a culture of speculation (of what "really happened"), politics, and distrust.
I have no idea what really happened behind the scenes and why exactly the new CEO used this language, but I can assure you that any email from David Sacks will not be clumsy, but very deliberate and written to achieve a specific purpose. (There is some speculation on earlier threads around of why it might have been written this way).
If you are in that type of situation, you have to chose between your employees and external parties, and looks like he decided that creating a trusted relationships with his employees was more important...