I've come to realize a lot of business trends can be reduced to "higher ups are now convinced that x is not actually necessary".

See "we don't need managers" (flat orgs), "we don't need infra" (DevOps philosophy), "we don't need QA" (devs handling testing), "we don't need product" (product engineering), "we don't need frontend devs" (no code generators) and of course all the AI related workforce reduction.

To me, it says something about how detached leadership is from how the sausage is made.