I'm trying to be descriptive, not prescriptive. It's a black hole because these machines will acquire anything and feed it through the cash flow machine. Massive waves of layoffs because there will be multiple 1K+ layoffs coming over the next year or two as they execute the integration plan.

Massive waves of layoffs are bad for most people and usually great for the company but I won't put a value judgment on it. Some think it "leaves them free to pursue more productive things" and others think "that person is going to struggle for a while due to corporate greed for cash flow." Candidly, I've done several of these deals before where we merge two companies of similar complexity and lay off 50-70% of the combined headcount. The company almost always turns out better for it. Things are that inefficient past a certain FTE size.

For those laid off, it's a different story. An internal analysis done by consultants my team hired 3 years after a multi-stage layoff of 10K people found that >50% of those affected were materially worse off and only 10% were better off. Statistical analysis on the strongest prediction of negative outcomes was age. Nothing else was even close to as relevant.