I hate to say it but this feels inevitable. We've accepted that the requirement (legally!) of a public company is to deliver the maximum possible returns to investors, and as such, employees become a cost center to optimize away, and just generally, anything that negatively impacts the quarterly report must be eliminated, even if that thing is the only thing that will keep the next quarterly report in the black.

Quarterly scope for fiscal data is one of the most short-sighted decisions humans have ever done. Expecting quarterly up-and-to-the-right, where simple sustenance is not enough, but profit must grow quarterly, on a planet with finite resources in an economy with finite money, is a guaranteed, zero-exceptions, recipe for failure, by definition.