> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done

I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly.

Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?

There's always bugs that can be fixed, there's always optimizations that can be done, there's always a feature that someone wants to build but hasn't had budget to do. There's always improvements that can be done for deployment. There's always ways of reducing memory. There's always ways of reducing ongoing expenses etc.

I have worked for a bunch of companies, and even relatively new and young companies have all these things pile up pretty quickly.

Have you tried looking for a job recently? The job market is cooked and it's not getting better any time soon. The supply of candidates is way up. Salaries are going down. Even mediocre jobs show 100+ applicants on LinkedIn.

> Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?

True. Joining thousands of other unemployed developers sending applications into a job posting for a nonexistent role online is very productive. Probably good for the economy too now that I think about it.