This is the part I don't like. Stripe is a hugely successful company and they have no urgent material need to let people go. This is an optimization effort. I actually do believe that 'pruning' is a healthy thing for organizations, to enable them to be nimble and dynamic - however - obviously this comes at great social cost. The benefits of 'pruning' come at the cost of externalizing regular, creating real human chal…
Indirectly, what you are suggesting is that the company string people along for as long as possible and give them busy work. So people would get the money, but not their time.
What Stripe did with their severance package is give employees both the money and their time back. Few people would likely prefer still having to go to a pointless job.
(And of course Stripe had an urgent need to let people go, they wouldn't have the money to pay such significant, if any, severance.)
There is no "zero costs" way to operate an economy. If we increase the long-term responsibilities of a company to their employees - as opposed to giving the same amount of safety net via public means - it will have a significant impact on willingness to hire.
Stripe's severance package, which is as generous or more so than the most advanced democratic socialist countries, is about as good as one can hope or should hope to get from a company.
If longer benefits are desired, the voters of California would need to come together on that and figure out how to finance it. But conflating the LA homeless / drug crisis with the 14-week severance packages for high skilled workers doesn't add up.
(Side notes: the perception of job loss in Japan is drastically different than in the U.S. and the Bank of Japan has been lending money at near zero rates for decades. The result has been a plethora of zombie companies.)