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I lurk on all the generally open Google-internal fora, and I think I have only heard one person try to make this case. The vast majority of employees who say anything about this are opposed to layoffs to increase the stock price.

If there is internal pressure from everyday employees advocating to accomplish this, they are being extraordinarily quiet. Unlike basically every other cause for which employees try to pressure the company. Google is quite open internally to people saying we should change this or that. It's almost a past time.

So I think this explanation is very unlikely.

I've never seen anyone directly make this case. Most people seem to want their colleagues (many of whom are friends) to keep their jobs more than they want the stock price to go up.

It's a serious problem for retention when people's total comp drops by a large amount, and some companies (e.g. Doordash) have given people extra stock to make up for it.