Hard agree. It was management who messed up hiring. It’s management who should bear the responsibility for it.

How should they do that? I hear that phrase, and it's easy to agree to, but how would it look in practice?

Stepping down vs mass layoffs reduces headcount by 1/20th, so the only other solution is to continue floundering until everybody loses their job. These people complaining about layoffs would prefer the whole plant to rot versus pruning a few wilting stems.

I’m not talking about solution. I’m talking about responsibility and aligning incentive.

Management should take a painful paycut or resign to demonstrate some contrition.

Agreed on the pay cut - even if temporary - and aligning incentives. Resignation frees them from a chance to correct their missteps. Just making a guess here, but I would think that, in general, good people who actually hold themselves accountable for screwing up understand the situation better than a replacement. Unless there is a pattern, it is probably in the org’s best interest to give that manager a shot at redemption, especially considering the glut of incompetent managers, the learning curve for competent managers, and the likelihood that a replacement would do a better job.

If an engineer screws up hugely, do you want get rid of them immediately and find a replacement, or evaluate whether or not they learned a very important and expensive lesson that may happen again with a replacement?

I agree, hence why I think it's shitty. I would like to see accountability for these people. They should be on the layoff chopping block IMHO.

But that said, you still have to deal with the situation and move forward. Sunk cost fallacy and all that