Tech corporations have always been enormous stores of (1) capital and (2) people. MSFT's flavor of this has always been "tech Berkshire Hathaway": a holding company for a diversified portfolio of a couple-dozen billion-dollar businesses. MSFT in particular is willing to park ~300 people on a seemingly-dead-end product, just waiting for the incumbent to mess up. Sometimes it eventually succeeds commercially (Teams, PowerBI) and sometimes it doesn't (or hasn't, yet, see Bing).

What is happening here is a sign they are changing their view on how this capital allocation works.

To what? We don't know, and I think they might not know yet, either. If you are spending > $4M for a top-end engineer and $8M on their tokens (this refers to a person know personally, it is not hearsay), this will necessarily change the how this allocation works. Maybe it doesn't make sense to park 300 people on tomorrow's PowerBI any more.

What is clear is that we are not in anything approaching an equilibrium state. MSFT (and others like them) clearly do not have enough conviction to fire all the line engineers and only keep the so-called "elite" ones. It's not even clear that they think we're on that trajectory. I think what we are seeing, though, is that they have enough conviction to try to clear the way for more of this kind of spending on these so-called "elite" developers.