I wasn't recently laid off, but I quit. In retrospect, my manager handled 1:1 meetings extremely poorly. He always asked me to lay out any aspects that I could improve. I confided in him that I wish I could be more organized, but the amount of work I had made it hard to focus on improvement task rather than problem solving in the code base.

When I quit (due to stress, in a high work load phase of a project), he included my phrases verbatim in my written job reference (these are common in Germany). He literally wrote that I was unfocused and easily overworked. When I complained, he made sure to let me know that the stated issues were just what I told him in our 1:1 meetings. I can only assume malice, since they were really unhappy about me quitting and they expected the project deadline to be missed because of it.