That didn't happen and instead every other tech CEO started to wonder about the amount of fat in their org.
I don't know anyone who expected this. The typical failure mode is slow degradation and lack of new development, not sudden collapse. Services become flakier, innovation stops. There was probably some fat to cut,as you put it, but the concept of eating your seed corn is also relevant.
You can read the HN threads from when this happened. People expected its imminent collapse.
It was done during the 2022 FIFA World Cup and you had people here predicting that it wouldn't last through the weekend due to that.
Worse, it continues to trend downward.
Most sane tech CEOs would prefer to keep their upward trend and $5+ billion revenue rather than saving $1 billion to lose $2.5 billion and invert their slope.
Also, most layoffs don’t cause huge cuts to advertising spend on their platform because of personal spite or political reasons. The product for all intents and purposes as an advertiser is the exact same.
My immediate reaction to that was the "jig is up"--I argued with friends that Twitters functionality would remain intact, there'd be no major outages, etc and they couldn't understand how that'd be possible.