Nobody believes that executives should be jailed for not offering severance - that's not what is being discussed. But if part of a termination agreement includes a guarantee of severance (and these termination agreements basically always include responsibilities for the employee to uphold in order to receive that sentence), and then you just decide not to pay it, and it looks like you basically never had the intent to pay it, that looks a lot more like fraud.

He also publicly promised severance to all employees he laid off, when laying them off, then tried to back out of it after the fact.

So we have both contract law and public statements that he owes severance to thousands of people, and now is just refusing to pay. What kind of behavior is that?

"Protect the vulnerable" there probably means enforcing contractual obligations to pay severance that was promised, not to offer severance in the first place.