It seems pretty obvious that Elon Musk acted as ablative armor for tech company layoff criticism and stock devaluation and the confidence snowballed.
But that's not the whole thing - it sounds like there was massive over-hiring of devs and some madness of trying to stop other companies getting them.
What a wasteland. The thing is there is a whole raft of interesting jobs out there that don't involve actively making society worse, so hopefully some devs will move out of this scene and onto something more constructive.
1. Twitter works. The cuts are reasonable.
2. I worked with a number of people from (pre-Musk) Twitter. The self entitlement culture the majority of these pre-Musk Twitter people espoused was toxic.
Hmm....