Okay, may have been my bad but it sounded like you thought that the same manager who fired the IC also was the one to offer to re-hire or something. Although your clarification about a firing theoretically needing approval from higher up sheds some light on that.

To your point, in general if you leave a place due to a bad manager (or get fired) and some kind of reform happens and you get invited back, usually the best move is not to come back. The organization already showed it was willing to toss you away at least once. That being said Netflix is probably a bit of an exception because it’s explicitly where you go to work if you want to work with people who are all insanely competent and hardworking and where performance is actually a core focus.

Also I still don’t quite understand the sociopathy element. It doesn’t seem sociopathic to say “hey we got rid of the toxic manager, want your old job back?” although like I said it’s still generally a bad idea to actually take the job back