Depends what sort of contract they have (and/or how much perceived leverage they have - firing high-income workers who have a public platform can make for messy PR)

Somewhere between 85% and 90% of all countries have some sort of mandated severance pay in the event of a layoff.

A small percentage of countries also mandate severance even if the employee is fired (with cause).

It is likely too late for many existing contracts with packages built-in, which probably also overlap with the longest-working (and thus most expensive) engineers.

From what I've seen (at a fortune 100 company) they made the supposedly "best" employees fully remote, and they neglected to tell the others that there were "limited slots" for fully remote and thus they had to come in to work. After a few months of coming in for work, they then laid off those employees, as not enough people quit for that to happen. To be fair, I was given a severance, but it still sucks. And the office was in bad shape, bathrooms poorly maintained, cafeteria in disarray, with substandard food (compared to before). The reason they're trying to get rid of employees is to make their stocks look good. We did better during covid by all measures, when everyone was working remotely.