Hold up - they didn’t “have to” let anyone go, they chose to because they wanted to hire other people.
No. They didn't "had to" produce more video content. But once they decided to do just that, they had to let people go because producing video is more expensive. That's what the GP is saying.
This may be true, or it may be that the "pivot to video" was the excuse they used for something they were going to do anyway.
Spot on. News publishers have been suffering from declining ads revenue for years. They needed to pivot to something anyhow.