I'd you team bought the latest IDE for $200/mo and was able to finish tickets, you 50% of your team be laid off?

Or would you just do more stuff?

I feel like most software projects have an endless backlog.

Better IDEs, programming languages, packages, frameworks, etc have increased our productivity, reduced bugs -- but rarely reduced headcount.

Ever hard anyone migrate from php+jQuery to react+node and reduce head count due to increased productivity?

I sometimes reminiscent about the LAMP stack being super productive. But at the time I didn't write tests :)