It's more like thinking the seed of eventual destruction was probably planted.
From a reliability perspective, there's probably two interesting forms of failure here.
One is latent, like shutting off backups. Like yeah, you can shut them off and nothing bad will happen imminently, but eventually something bad will happen, and that will be a very bad day. Firing an entire team of experts in a system is kinda like getting rid of backups or probably closer to making backups but not testing them. If you don't test your backups, maybe you will be fine, or maybe you won't.
The other is corrosive. Imagine upsetting a companies most impactful devs while simultaneously shrinking growth prospects. How are you going to hire amazing devs when the devs you have left are kinda mediocre or working due to coercion (h1b) rather than more positive reasons? What do you think Twitters sales pitch is to potential new hires?
Reliability/security/etc are all types of maintenance where most of the time you don't have a problem, but sometimes the little hook on your power line fails, resulting in the live cable hitting trees that weren't trimmed, on a forest rife with fuel that results in billions of dollars of damage. The lower the investment, the higher the chance of failure, every individual failure has the chance to compound with other failures into catastrophic failure.