Before I transitioned to management, I would read these stories from the perspective of an IC. That is, the one being fired. None of us likes to think of ourselves as under qualified or deserving of being fired, so these stories feel deeply unfair. They also play to tropes about businesses being inhumane or rigged against the individual, or the idea that everything that goes wrong is the manager’s fault rather than the blameless employee.
As a manager, I read these stories and immediately think of the problematic employees I’ve had to deal with over the years. Firing people is never easy, as you said, but one of the epiphanies of management is watching a team’s performance and morale improve after a refractory employee is removed from the company. It’s hard to truly understand until you’ve been through it, but some times it’s just not possible to manage underperforming or even troublesome employees into good team members. It’s also not fair to the rest of the team if you have to spend 50% of your time dealing with 10% of the employees causing all of the problems.
If nothing else, we have to acknowledge that interviewing is a highly imperfect process. It’s unrealistic expect companies to never make an incorrect hire, and it’s also unrealistic to expect companies to never fire any incorrect hires. Every company of significant size will always have some number of underperforming or troublesome employees. They don’t benefit by hiring people to fire them, but they do need to induce some targeted turnover to avoid accumulating incorrect hires.