I ran into the opposite situation. The people they hired were pretty good, but like you said the VCs gave the CEO a headcount target to hit in engineering and he did it because I guess the VCs are the ones calling the shots.

Instead of just being honest and saying "oops, we need to cut spending, they created bullshit KPIs and useless metrics to start marking people as underperformers"

So I suspect a lot of the VC funded companies have had 10%+ stealth layoffs.