>the normal behavior shareholders expect.

And for each CEO, those shareholders are mostly the same people.

It's easy to get sucked into thinking this is just the way the world works but really we've just enshrined a local and temporal phenomenon. Layoffs aren't a physical law. There are places and times where this would not happen.

Let me put my investor hat on: hiring at the top and firing at the bottom is a predictable inefficiency and represents a CEO failing at their responsibilities. You don't get to be a CEO and claim ignorance of market cycles.