There's a meaningful difference between the two. You're fired for doing something wrong. You're laid off if the company wants to cut costs.
Layoffs can make it look like the company is having problems so instead of doing that they will create vague KPIs so that employees will not meet them so they can be fired.
AFAICT, Google didn't go to the effort of creating vague objectives for people to fail at. Instead they've blanket cut teams regardless of their success or performance.