My guess is that the company set a goal to reduce headcount by X%, every executive was told to find some teams to cut, this team was expensive because the engineers in it were long tenured and excellent - and it caught someone's eye as a result.
Also there will be no revenue items for this quarter that are obviously at risk by cutting them that the person making decisions could be held accountable for.
If every team using Python is 10% less productive as they need to wait longer when they need changes from these central tools... they'll just blame the new team members.
One can only assume they want less Python in the company.
they've wanted less python for at least fifteen years, but getting rid of the python team just makes the enormous mass of python code and python developers less useful, it doesn't magically convert it to C++.