Layoffs might have to with what a person is working (project is no longer business priority, just cutting based on performance might lead to delays) or what team a person is working on (whole org gets the axe).
How is 1 false? Log improvement means for 10x the cost the model is 2x as good. For 100x the cost, the model is 3x as good.
Not a curve to be happy about TBH. You need to simultaneously find big efficiency wins and drive up costs substantially to get 4-5x improvements, and it is probably impossible to maintain good year on year improvements after the first 2-3 years when you get all the low hanging fruit.
I think the discussions in these threads show how accurate the framing of this article is. You have some people celebrating Google and friends (slowly) leaving the C++ ecosystem and those that continue to emphasize the flaws that have driven companies away from it in recent history (safety being #1) on the list.
Around the time the CoC was being established, Linus went to therapy. If I recall correctly, some people had spoke to him about his behaviors and he decided to do something about it. I think it was done in private so it's unclear how much of it was pressure vs his own decision. His tone has become much less aggressive since.
Go very much is memory safe in the absence of data races.
Data races cause issues in all languages, though it's fair to say that Go is affected slightly more than languages like Java. Rust is a bit special by making data races hard to trigger (impossible in safe code IIUC), but this is not typical.
ICEs have a lot of advantages that make them much better suited than EVs to certain tasks (extreme climates and remote locations, for example). They will likely stick around for niche use cases (at least) for quite a long time.
As for why Porsche is spending money on ICE engines...well, no one really buys a Porsche because it's a "practical car", do they?
Not sure early versions of rust is the best example of refcounting overhead. There are a bunch of tricks you can use to decrease that, and it usually doesn't make sense to invest too much time into that type of thing while there is so much flux in the language.