Understanding someone's whole life and making a corresponding graceful/merciful decision is at the discretion of the manager. In general, corporate incentives will guide managers towards firing if there is not overwhelming evidence that the person actually usually is or can be an above-average performer. Corporations are not set up to act like charities. The rare manager that can be compassionate in the face of his corporate incentives is at risk of himself being fired if he becomes too charitable too much.
This assumes that somebody actually cares, if they do, they would know that already by asking.
That assumes they can trust the answer.
This heavily depends on the environment and the culture of a company | department. In my experience, managers that actually do care about their employees tend to have much better results than the opposite.
Such understanding would likely extend to an individual's privacy, so people and institutions that subvert privacy (even with the consent of the surveilled) are unlikely to be induced to empathy by a profusion of data.
What it does likely mean is that there will be a reason to fire everyone. So management can use whatever excuse they'd like to get rid of someone just because of office politics. It's a bit harder now since they generally have to do bogus performance reviews etc.