These companies are basically dying. So might as well manage the decline and return money to investors.
It's good for the economy as a whole if employees move to other companies; instead of engaging in make-work.
On the good side, I was allowed to view this from the perspective of spreadsheets and board meetings and see the net gains. And also do follow-up analysis that showed the least product people retiring or moving to lower quality work while the most productive went on to do 10x better things.
The dark side isn't pretty. We still had to lay off tens of thousands, affecting hundreds of thousands indirectly localized to a handful of communities and cities. I've decimated neighborhoods before by the literal definition (10%+ move out to find work in other cities). And the data tells us that at least a couple of those people will die as a result of the layoffs at the 10K+ scale. Can't talk macro-productivity when that's happening. Too tone deaf.
To my investment committee? We're in sell mode and using the positive coded language you outline. "We see $350M in day 1 synergies (this means fire thousands of people immediately). $600M by the end of our 180-day plan. And $1b by completion of our value creation plan 365 days post-close. This builds in a 1.8x floor for cash flow growth even if we're delayed in synergy realization and frees up cash for our go-to-market investments. Given the current GTM org returns $1 of ARR for every $1 spent, and our current market analysis of total whitespace, we plan on investing 30% of every dollar saved into our sales and marketing initiatives and additional 5% in a product refresh focused around key sales rep pain points like UI/UX and ease of use."
Even when we're selling to our IC, it's still very factual because these people are professional BS-detectors.