It's more profitable to eliminate employee costs than make new products. There's a reason layoffs make stock prices soar far more than product announcements.

Depends on which company you are, if Nvidia announced a layoff US stock market will collapse. If Microsoft did, then they will be lauded.

Layoffs aren't indicators of success or failure, just some theoretical tea leaf reading style signal for future profits of a company. So if a company is already growing unbelievably fast layoffs are a bad sign, if a company is slowing in growth apparently having employees on business units not working out is equally a bad sign.

And for many companies these layoffs are the modern version of Roman public executions with the audience(investors) cheering it on.

it is somewhat sad that a company already profitable would devote it's time and energy and profits to becoming more profitable instead of doing cool shit. doing cool shit always seems to be a better idea than anything else when one has profit.