The organizations that are using mass top-down layoffs as a strategy may not have the ability to do something more granular. And I don't mean that in terms of organizational size (though it seems inevitably correlated), I mean it in the sense that an organization's ability to manage its talent is a direct result of the quality of the organization's management hierarchy, which is the same hierarchy responsible for organizational bloat.

If your management hierarchy has too many mediocre managers, you lose the ability to evaluate who is/isn't pulling their weight at fine granularity, so you're stuck with blunt tools.