Yep - IME the trick is that fixing a bloated company is 2 parts: laying off bloat, and fixing the bad processes / restructuring the company to not need so much bloat in the first place.

I’ve worked at a company that pulled the layoff lever a lot but never did the hard work of investing in fixing the broken stuff… the layoffs actually just made everything worse.

If you have a team whose job is to put duct tape on the widget when it leaks, and you lay off most of that team without fixing the widget, your leak gets worse because you have fewer people with duct tape.

What you need is find people who can fix the widget, then fire all the duct tape people.