(incidentally, they also had some regime in which automation was predicted to increase wages, but I didn't read that closely)
riffing* off https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week121.html I think decategorisation is about forgetting the differences between the maps into and out of two apples and two oranges (and even two fruits), leaving us with just a (relabelable) set of cardinality 2?
(via JvN's construction: {∅,{∅}})
EDIT: taking connected components of the projection down to the "largest groupoid" sounds very similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weak_component : the finest partition (here, of objects from the original category) that is totally ordered by reachability (direction of arrows from the original category).