Layoffs has nothing to do with employees. Large corps protect their ecosystem via buying all talent from the market, they just deprive competitors of people who can create competitive products. This is especially true in Software Engineering space, look at volume of open source projects, the entire open source ecosystem is basically piracy of commercially successful ideas. It takes years to evolve some products and months to rewrite them into open source. So the same happens in start up space, small start up having 3-5 talented engineers can easily compete against large corporate products created by MS, Amazon and etc. The current layoffs indicate that large corporations consider current market to be low risk, so they don't care to keep people they never needed in the first place. I head dozens of stories about former amazon employees who ware saying that after passing infamous Amazon interview process they had no job to do for months, the hiring team did not need people at all, the HR just push more people into teams, as a result manager was jut asking new employee to go and do something useful.
We have relatively high interests rates, so current market is safe in terms of large corporations survival, they have a lot of space for reductions and they have no threat from starts ups around them. Absence of startups activity does not require aggressive investment into high risk hypothetical products and markets, no need to invest into them.
If large corporation supports outdated or basically obsolete product from technological stack perspective, but accounting for major source of profits, corp. does not need to invest into innovative products to keep its developers happy and busy. They wont go anywhere, they would cling to old product support for the sake of job safety, So large corps may consider to put on hold all those initiatives designed to keep employees busy and happy.