I honestly thought this was one of the weaker points of the article.

The OpenAI deal almost certainly related purely to GPU capacity, which had little to do with the article. The layoffs would have happened regardless.

IMO - churn, and generalization is the root cause. Engineers are thrown on projects for a year with little prior experience, leave others to pickup the pieces, etc. There's no longer a sense of ownership, and I'm sure the recent wave of layoffs isn't helping with this.