In Germany this is known as "Kurzarbeit" (literal translation: short work). The company reduces the work hours of employees and the pay gets cut proportionally. The cut hours will be paid by the state at a rate of 60% (67% for workers with children, the rate is the same as unemployment).

So if a worker's hours get cut by 50%, they still get paid 80-83.5% of their wage. The company can choose to get the employees' pay back to 100% if they pay the difference, which sometimes happens if the hours are cut because there is not enough work and not because the company is in financial distress.

This helped quite a lot of companies to stay in business during COVID.

Not sure that I'm right, but I have the impression that for companies that are strongly driven by "shareholder vale" (like Intel as it appears), if before the pay cut it is thought that cutting jobs would give a net benefit (again in terms of shareholder value only), shortly after the pay cut they will think so again/still think so, even if the pay cut was justified by being able to avoid layoffs in this way.

There are still plenty of opportunities out there. Layoffs are a social contagion that do very little, if anything, for a company’s financial health. This is all about the trend and trying to “discipline” labor. But it won’t work, especially this time because the US doesn’t have decent childcare (many mother won’t return to the workforce for a year or more) and has blocked millions of immigrants who would normally have entered the country the past several years.

That wouldn't be a problem for the more talented players - the ones you most want to keep

Apple, Google, Nvidia & gang will always be happy to snap up a few promising/experienced engineers.