On the contrary, if anything, it's evidence in support of the point. It shows that Microsoft desires to trim its employee rolls. Now if you do a proper layoff, you have to pay people quite a lot of money. So if you can make at least some of them leave on their own, that's substantial savings.

"Hey, let's increase our operating costs by over a hundred million per year _forever_ by doing RTO for a one time savings of a few million in severance packages of people who leave voluntarily." said nobody ever. Thank you for highlighting again how comedic these conspiracy theories are.