More broadly, I'm not sure this really is a strategy per-se. If Mark had a true grand vision for Facebook and Meta I think we would have seen it by now. I think this was just some money-man's recommendation made by looking at numbers on a spreadsheet.
There's likely a bunch of people who CTCI-ed their way into Meta. They're not competent and not motivated. They might as well be bank robbers, in it for the money and free lunches.
These people would be a burden on their team and other high competence staff. I think turning up the heat might weed them out. It's possible it'll have collateral damage, but it could well be that Zuckerberg realizes they should be getting down to their roots. If he doesn't act, the company will likely be synonymous with Yahoo. High performers will leave a company on its way down anyway.
What does this phrase mean?
Facebook is in real bad shape (don't call it Meta, that's just a scheme to distract people from Facebook being in real bad shape.)
They've quit subsidizing VR headsets which is a sign they've given up on "the metaverse", the current ambition is to catch up with Tik Tok.
Sounds like a bullshit claim to me, as someone who thinks the metaverse thing will never work
To mangle something usually means to mutilate it and by extension a mangler is someone who does that.
You could also cut based on sparsity —- ie cut positions which are least costly to rehire.
Or cut based on dependence — cut positions which are least critical.
Or cut positions that are most dependent on near future revenue.
In all one can see how a multi criteria cut could be reasonably argued — in the end it only needs to mostly succeed.