Suppose you wanted to leave. There are 2 choices:

A) Voluntarily leave and get some sort of severance.

B) Wait and gamble that the company decides to ask you to leave.

If you wait and are not selected to leave, you likely won't get any severance. So if you are angling to leave, it's safer to just take the package.

They want to bias the volunteers towards those who really don't like the company and those who haven't been there as long.

If a company over-hired in non-core areas during the last two years because valuations were high, they might want to shed non-core workers that they feel that they don't really "need". But they definitely don't want to lose the best people working on the core business.

The people who take voluntary leave are often the most able to quickly find a new job (i.e. the best people). So it is not in their best interest to incentivize that.

Probably aligns closer to the default onboarding package, rather than comparatively to this new layoffs package. Otherwise it makes no sense to me

Either way, I'm more curious about those airtight NDAs on the way out