You can't just broadly look at all companies for patterns in layoffs. It's important to divide startups from IPO'd companies.
A common pattern for all of these is the inability to generate profit, but this is business-as-usual for a startup. Even in normal times it's okay for startups to lose money.
Startups typically perform layoffs because they are running out of runway and need to extend the life of the company. Their entire reason for existing is the liquidity event that is either acquisition or IPO, and it is essential for investors that they survive long enough to see such an event.
For publicly traded companies, which we've seen a lot of layoffs in recently (which in the last 30 days includes: Twilio, Rent the Runway, Uber, Shopify, Snap, Wayfair, New Relic). The common theme for almost all of this is negative net earnings and B2C. This is what makes Twilio interesting, they're the first B2B IPO with major layoffs.
One thing that I keep hearing at my IPO'd startup is that "we won't have layoffs since we have a long runway", but runway matters way less for IPO'd companies. The key aim for IPO'd companies is to please your investors, and if you're shares keep taking a hit because interest rates go up and your net earnings remains steeply negative, then layoffs are coming.
If this continues it will start to impact profitable companies, but not before doing much more damage to the non-profitable ones. This feels like a slow motion re-enactment of the dot com burst.