That’s far too broad a claim. Just because you’re turning a profit doesn’t mean you should be locked into keeping all of your employees. Some are likely to be underperformers who don’t bring sufficient ROI compared to other investments/hires you could make.
The more correct statement is they suddenly cared about under performers. It's not any different than say, you noticing your grocery bills going up and as a result you cancel all the subscriptions you don't need. It's not like all those SaaS services' value propositions suddenly plummeted because the price of eggs went up, but now you suddenly have an eye for cutting costs.
Underperformers should be rotated out long before a mass layoff occurs. If your company isn’t axing them until a mass layoff, they’re doing bad business.