Six months of severance per fired employee is a rounding error. If you're doing things right and hiring properly, less than 2% of the people you bring in should ever be fired anyway. So you're talking about 0.12 months (just 4 days) of salary per employee. Again, a rounding error.

Also, the sleazy tech company alternative (to severance) of PIPing the employee for 2-3 months is more expensive than severance, because of the effects on morale to force the manager to run a kangaroo court and the team to deal with a walking-dead employee who's probably pissing on morale intentionally (I would).

France (and, more generally, Europe) has its problems but that is not even on the top 20. Social class fatalism is more of a problem, and that's reinforced by the fact that (unlike in the U.S.) it's very hard to get even moderately wealthy by working. Programmers and lawyers and doctors make less than here, and costs of living are higher, which means that born social class imposes a ceiling. European countries are far better places than the U.S. for the poor and working class, but the middle-class people who want to rise further tend to come here. This is even worse in parts of Asia, where the idea that you can get rich by working is laughable.