Forget justifiable - no, it's not justifiable. It is necessary, in many circumstances. There are circumstances where your continued employment with a company will lead to worse consequences for you and everybody else there than if you're let go.

I also didn't say management is harder than engineering, I said "more constrained". I believe that it's harder to be a good manager than a good engineer, but it's harder to be an average engineer than an average manager. And that again comes from constraints: a good manager tries to do right by everybody, while an average manager doesn't care. You have the option of ignoring your constraints in both professions, but an engineer that ignores his constraints won't make any progress at all, while a manager that ignores his constraints can sometimes muddle through until all of his people quit.