In many cases the company can run fine for a while... the systems that engineers already built will continue to function until a certain point. Once they start

In many cases the company can run fine for a while... the systems that engineers already built will continue to function until a certain point. Once they start breaking/failing the company needs to hire additional people for maintenance/improvements. Often these are people who hadn't worked on the original systems and don't have a full understanding of the stack/systems involved this leads to many other issues... knowledge fragmentation, tech debt, maintenance difficulties, increased bugs, etc. I've seen this happen many times in large orgs, and the people making the decisions to cut engineers in certain areas often aren't responsible for what happens down the line and don't need to deal with the fallout. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯