This doesn't seem to me to explain why the layoffs are happening now. AFAIK Google has never done a true layoff until last January in the entire history of the company. Now it seems to be already routine.

As someone who grew up in the 80s-90s, my historical sense of layoffs is that they were a response to economic hard times, whether industry-wide or company-specific. Companies laid off when profits fell or disappeared, which then drove a need to search for ways to cut costs.

But the major tech companies are all seeing continuously growing revenues and profits within the context of very healthy general economic numbers, yet they are all laying people off.