Once upon a time, a few employers back, I took a couple year detour into our internal IT department... One day our manager had the misfortune of being asked to help the head of sales with their commission calculation spreadsheet. The IT manager, bless their heart, decided they needed to share a glimpse of that information with someone, and for whatever reason that landed on me.
Every salesperson on that spreadsheet who wasn't on the cusp of being let go was earning more in commission than the cash compensation of any executive listed in our public filings. Our couple of SEs were above Director title comp.
It was a minor shock seeing those numbers, but they reflect a pretty basic economic reality: Acquiring $1 of ARR can be worth quite a bit.
Sure, it's naive to say that Sales Trumps Everyone, Always. But most of the time, for a business with a high enough CLTV to justify having a salesforce, it would be an exceptionally bad sign to see general lay-offs impacting Sales as much as the rest of a company.