Something very similar is happening, at a very rapid pace, in software development.
99% of the time it doesn't matter because most software is worthless or trivial. A sibling thread highlights the decline of Google: What a horror if someone were to receive subpar search results or view an advert that hadn't been auctioned at the most profitable rate.
There is a lot of software used in finance, medicine, transportation, logistics, aerospace, manufacturing, and robotics where a simple whoopsies isn't going to undo the loss of money and the loss of life.
I've been in this business for 40 years and I've worked in several verticals. You'd be amazed at how much software is critical to the continued operations of modern civilization. Software has increased the carrying capacity of the planet, and without it, literally billions of people would die.
This isn't as innocuous as you make it. Add up wasted minutes for millions of users and you're looking at thousands of lifetimes.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that access to information is a force multiplier. Google doesn't have a monopoly on that, but it's hardly worthless or trivial.
There are many industries where this is not the case: aerospace, medical device engineering, and live TV production all come to mind.
That 1% of the time software is critital, it is messing too many lives... things like royal mail and what not.
Software has been like that for st least three decades.
Less than 5 years of experience at Google is, to be fair, common. But the company doubled in size over that time, so it's inevitable. And higher turn over in tech is common (and I don't think that is necessarily reflective of anything other than the fact it's easy to get another job as a software engineer).
I can't state much on the layoffs because my team was not heavily affected.