> If your complaint is that she was a fine CFO but a terrible CEO then i can hardly see her going back to a CFO role as failing upwards

Failing upwards would be her announcing she's raised money for a new start-up at which she will be CEO. (EDIT: To be clear, I'm agreeing with you.)

Instead, she's going back to where she has a track record. It would be like Musk selling Twitter. Or David Marcus going back to 2001 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Marcus

Yeah I agree with that. OpenAI is obviously a much bigger and more relevant company than Nextdoor, but she is going back to a role she has a proven track record at.