> I know plenty of people that reacted with the desired fear, putting in long hours to avoid layoffs, willingness to accept lower pay because the job market sucks, etc. - but I think there are also plenty of the the mythical 10x engineers that just checked out, stopped being 10x engineers, and are just collecting their paychecks and waiting for the layoff now. And I'm not sure you can "get them back", ever.

In general it seems that companies are pretty bad about this type of logic. It's the same issue with trying to force attrition through "return to office" or similar things as a way of getting the cost cutting without having to pay severance; the people who will walk away are the ones who are have enough money to not need immediate employment (who are more likely to be from the higher-compensated members of the workforce, which in a competently-run company would be the most valuable ones) or who know they're in high enough demand to be able to find something else fairly quickly, so likely the ones who they should be trying hardest to retain. This is pretty much the exact opposite of what they actually want, which is to stop paying people who they don't need.