I'm a relatively experienced employee, and my (now former) company has just laid off HALF of our staff

I'm a relatively senior software developer, with roughly ten years experience. I've had a couple of roles in my career where I got laid off, and at the time it was rough. But I always managed to find work quickly, and bounce back.<br><br>The company I work for is a mid-to-large-sized company, highly profitable, and not struggling with money. We have over 5,000 employees and we've just been made remote-first after the pandemic. We've just been told that roughly half of our employees (some teams are completely eliminated) are being let go. We've been told that these laid-off employees will get some (reasonable) benefits, assistance in finding a new job, and a pretty solid severance package. Over the last couple of years, we've done a fair amount of hiring, and had an extremely high employee retention rate.<br><br>The reason given for the huge downsizing, is that they (our leadership) believe that we can function just fine with a smaller staff. The CEO is very confident in his decision, and has talked to us about this for months. He has also managed to convince the board and investors this is the right decision as well.<br><br>My gut reaction is to think this is a really bad idea. Part of it is probably being a bit too close to the situation, but I don't really understand how this is going to work. Over the years we've only grown because we hired more people to stay on top of our workload. The management also don't seem to have a clear plan for how to follow-through and manage this change. A couple of months ago, leadership told us that they're going to take their time, so that we can make sure we stay on top of things.<br><br>But now, all of a sudden, it seems like it's full steam ahead. There's going to be a lot of people from all sorts of departments let go. We've been told that they'll try to keep everyone, and want to keep everyone working up until their last day. But the reality is that things are going to change. It seems like they want to be a much smaller company, and do less work. We've blocked off a quarter of our work for this year, that we (supposedly) no longer need to do.<br><br>I just don't see how this is going to work. The CEO seems very happy, and I have no idea what's going through his mind. My concern is that this will be a disaster, and that company will fail. And given the times we're living in, I'm not sure it will be easy to find work again. I'm not really sure what to do at this point.