Without a complementary policy to cut salaries for introducing inefficiencies, they just created the unbounded incentive for more inefficiencies that can lead to ever larger savings.

Cutting wages is legally problematic in many jurisdictions, but certainly there's a case for reducing bonus payments by the reward amount paid to others if your code was later found to be at fault and it looked like negligence that caused it. Obviously, you'd need to be very careful here otherwise people would push back on anything that generates data traffic just in case usage of that functionality grew later on.