When you work on the "ML Ethics, Transparency, & Accountability Team" at Twitter and you wonder why you were laid off. Twitter is a bloated mess. This was going to happen in any case.
ML/AI also have a host of ethics concerns that I think it's incredibly important to grapple with lest we all slide into a Black Mirror level rabbit hole someday.
Now, it's possible they had unqualified or do-nothing people in those roles; I don't know. But having teams with those goals in general seems quite important for a large social media platform like Twitter.