They cut quite a lot projects and side products (from tweet deck to different statistics and insights to ads), some other things they scaled down a lot (in the past one could read everything without being signed in, now they limit to sign in users, which certainly takes a lot of load and thus need to keep systems running)

Also initially they had a lot of breakage.

Also they made an entire separate company X.ai to do Grok and some other stuff which certainly involved hiring people.

Indeed when you have fewer people you generally reduce scope

Looking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.

The claim isn’t that they’re thriving. It’s that it works. I’m not sure on any figures since it isn’t a public company. Where are you getting your numbers?

More bots than ever, bots can be interesting , but outside the political intrigue behind their commissioning these bots are not very interesting.

And, for now at least, advertisers on twitter can't sell products to these bots. So lost money.