It's not just a question of shareholder value and profits always needing to go up - there are real society-wide opportunity costs to companies like Sony continuing as before. All of the workers they employ and the resources they use are workers and resources that cannot instead be producing other things, and the increase in interest rates that's lead to all these layoff is essentially a signal that those opportunity costs are higher and the bar for economic activity to be viable is higher than before.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the pandemic and the economic shutdowns hugely impacted economic output in a way that couldn't be magicked away by printing money and handing out furlough payments - all the furloughed and unemployed workers and shuttered still produced nothing during that time, that unusued capacity could not be saved up for later, and so it wasn't possible for everyone to continue buying the same amount of stuff as before even though goverments in the developed world tried to create the illusion they could. This also created a temporary increase in demand in certain sectors, like video games, which has since vanished.