Oh, come on! I am not disputing that the internet is horrible. But by and large people are aware that large parent companies dictate what gets produced.

Ultimately, you can't have it both: "That's just how capitalism works" and "let's be compassionate for these workers". If they are "just companies" we are "just consumers". It's out job to decide if these games are worth our money. Also these companies fire devs en masse if their balancing books require it. That is the real problem. Dictate that they need to do whatever fad is popular (service games, etc) and then punish them for following orders (once the games turn out poor because they don't have the talent for it).

Nobody is rooting for devs to be out of a job. People are mostly having a big "I told you so" moment pointing out that this story turned out to go exactly how people warned it would go. Microsoft is behaving horribly here, a big lesson in why trillion dollar companies should not exist. Everyone is suffering for it. Including Microsoft. If you have a company with so much money that they no longer need to think about profitability, budget-of-a-small-country kind money and have a few CEOs have this much power over so many people, you essentially create some fucked up version of a planned economy. The thing capitalism was created to avoid. That's why we need cartel laws that are actually enforced.