I was in the same boat, and this is right on. The founders assumed everyone who got spared was going to be so happy they stayed with the ship until it went down. In reality, we experienced a combination of survivor's guilt for our unemployed friends, burnout at the increased workload, and anger at the founders for making choices that led to that situation. The remaining people on my team just used the reprieve to find new positions while being able to pay their bills, and we all quit, coincidentally on almost the same day.
The founders did not adequately think through the ramifications of their decisions, and it did seem (as another commenter in this thread succinctly put it) that they viewed everyone as very predictable NPCs in their narrative.
As someone who has had to execute large layoffs before — hindsight is 20/20. It’s easy to identify bad decisions after the fact. I’d have loved a crystal ball that could have told me half our customers were going to go out of business, the remainder would almost all cancel their projects, and we wouldn’t be able to close a new deal for at least the next six months. It was a really bad year, and I laid myself off at the end of it. It took me two years to get over it.
The founders did not adequately think through the ramifications of their decisions, and it did seem (as another commenter in this thread succinctly put it) that they viewed everyone as very predictable NPCs in their narrative.