It is known there were many developers without really much work to do that were hired only to be denied to competitors. Maybe it was cleaned up in the meantime
Big companies hired a lot, but I don’t think this specifically is true? In theory a high-value engineer would be productive, or else they aren’t worth stealing.
The simpler explanation seems more correct here — there was a lot of product fluff and a lot of headcount allocated to build that fluff.
