That's very nonspecific.
"But it was just a joke!" "No Grandpa, you're just a racist."
You're right though, it is a lot more prevalent than just high profile cases. But I also assume your friend deserved it.
Don't speak for others.
My personal experience is that women I never had romantic relationships with pretended that I raped them to get influence or money (once as a teen, once as an adult). Talking about this openly 3 friends have told me that similar things have happened to them. But I also won't give you specifics so you'll probably assume that we deserved it.
This subthread is literally a response to someone speaking on behalf of a friend.
And that logic is a little suspect: cancel culture is such a pervasive threat that (1) no one can talk about it happening despite (2) everyone talking about it happening everywhere, pervasively, without evidence.
That doesn't seem off to you?
Did the firing come before or after actual loss of customers who read his idea of a joke and freely decided (on a "yeah, fuck that guy" basis) that they weren't going to give him their money any more?
I ask that question because public relations is, in fact, part of a CEO's job - and if he was "forced out", that suggests there were other people whose money was tied up in the company, and so he actually had a financial responsibility to read the room better than he evidently did, just from your description.
Part of the responsibility of working a day job in a company is not to shit the desk. I'm hard pressed to call this basic social requirement "cancel culture".