I beg to differ. The companies have made it difficult by doing constant rounds of layoffs. The state of unemployment in the sector is such that pretty much any vanilla position could be filled by a US LPR or citizen and the process is designed to obfuscate it so those people never see the job (eg internal job posting boards, advertising in physical newspapers).

PERM isn't meant to be an automatic process. I get that the employee wants permanent status but the employer can't have it both ways. You can't constantly need to be doing layoffs AND be unable to fill what is probably a pretty generic position (like "software engineer").