I've generally found that if you can't measure something well, large American companies act extremely poorly with regards to that thing.

Its well understood that layoffs destroy the morale of your employees, and that they drive out a huge percentage of employees, and specifically the ones who have the best alternative options.

But I imagine that measuring the impact of brain drain from a layoff after a subsequent overhire compared to potential growth losses from not overhiring during the boom is one of those things that is extremely hard to measure.

Good on Apple and Nintendo for having strong enough and competent enough leadership to make that call, instead of the typical metric based CYA.