Its only the part about casting any aspersions at the people laid off for being low performance that bothers me because I know so many incredible people for whom they absolutely did not deserve it and its not fair to assume anything about their value or quality of their work specifically.

> that doesn’t mean that the industry overall doesn’t have too many people for the amount of work that needs to be done.

Not that I disagree with you here, but it is hard to square this with people who are also saying not to worry about AI displacement because there's limitless demand for software.

Depends on the industry and product, as usual. On an large level, I do not think there's "too many engineers and not enough problems to be solved". Companies are simply hunkering down for a recession we can't say out loud.