People pointed out in the other thread that smaller scale layoffs have always been a thing. Projects that aren't performing well or are no longer needed get cut all the time and usually members of those teams go with it. We just heard about it a lot less before the large scale layoffs because it was kind of standard business practice. Nowadays, layoffs are an engaging topic, so any layoff, no matter how 'normal,' is going to get attention.

Also you have company mergers especially during market consolidation. If there are overlapping products and or roles then that leads to layoffs and tech is full of such companies.