The information is that the company thought it could grow more during the pandemic by hiring new people, and "bet" growth would stick around and those people could stay on in the long term. Is that wrong? Well, that's business. (I have absolutely no doubt, of course, that the "bet"-nature of the employment was carefully communicated during hiring.)
The PR is that this business decision is presented as a story of Shopify's brave history of taking on daring bets, its decision to take on another, its defeat at the hands of unflinching (completely external) factors, its kind treatment of employees that there is no option but to let go in these difficult times, and the new, refocused, decisive organization that will be reborn (after some people who joined 6 months ago get laid off).
It's not all bad. 16 weeks severance seems generous to me, letting people keep their chairs is kind of random but nice, the job referral stuff is a nice gesture, etc. I know all the nice things you did! The P was R'd!
It's just, at the end of the day, it's an obviously-business decision that's being told as something else. People got fucked over by a confluence of factors after the higher-ups decided to take a risk. There's no story here. There's no arc of Shopify History. The job of PR, regardless of the letters after the name of whoever writes it, is to make it seem like there is one when bad stuff happens.