Any other kind of a project - construction, hardware design, media production - has an end. Once it's done people have to switch to another project.
But with software there's an expectation that it's never done, it's always subtly broken, and I can't help but think that this expectation gets baked into methodologies which produce software.
Also these are SAAS products, the kind that have predictable patterns of development, not one off software consultancies, so you're not actually making a good comparison.
Lay-offs only look hypocritical to people who are confusing for-profit companies with cooperatives. FWIW, personally, I like the idea of cooperative, but it seems otherwise rather unpopular.
Regarding predictable patterns, note that managers are incentivized to do busy work rather than report that software is "done". E.g. if you're a manager and you know that you already implemented all reasonable features and only need minor maintenance, would you report that to executives, risking your job? Or would you try (perhaps subconsciously) make some bullshit excuse: "we need such and such features to boost our revenue, also we need to migrate to <new-framework> to increase performance to be competitive, so yeah, we need more people"? It might not even seem an excuse because it's what everyone does -- all managers are like that.
There's a give and take here that your analysis refuses to acknowledge. "Meta" is not a physical entity that can protect its property, it relies on humans engaging in the ruse (for money to be clear, ie a job).
> Regarding predictable patterns, note that managers are incentivized to do busy work rather than report that software is "done".
This is an abject failure of the executive levels then, given that managing that sort of thing is their role. More or less brings us back to the same point of "why do we all have to suffer because the C-suite can't do their jobs?".