There have been a couple of cases of honesty in tech layoffs in the last couple where the employer specifically said that the layoffs were for performance which added insult to injury to the people laid off in that round and damaged their future hiring prospects, e.g. https://www.fastcompany.com/91262263/meta-rebranded-performa.... I'd rather not have the honesty in that case; that's a terrible thing to do to people.

Was that really honesty? I'm sure some who were caught in the layoff were truly underperforming, but everyone has peaks and valleys in their output quality over the years, and tons of performance reviews are purely political (i.e. does your manager like you).

It doesn't read so much like "honesty" to me as it does arrogance and spite (which, to be fair, aligns with everything I've heard about their corporate culture). Fundamentally, responsibility for layoffs is always on the shoulders of corporate leadership; regardless of individual employee performance, each of them was vetted extensively and ultimately hired by Meta; the company could have elected to work with them to bring performance up to a higher standard (if you believe their claim that it wasn't), but instead they chose to amputate them en-masse.

It's not "honest" to punish and blame a huge swath of your workforce in a single stroke for your hiring and management mis-steps, it's cowardly and lazy.