Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the economic rationale behind a company keeping a large portion of its workforce idle? That's a waste of labor. Sure, it's probably a good idea to keep people paid for a while after layoffs to ease their transition to an in-demand job. But that's what unemployment benefits do.
What is a waste and to whom? The employees still get paid, so they get the main value they signed up for. A bigger waste would be loss of income and security for these employees. So its a waste for the bottom line of the company owners? Thats what 100 people max? Compared to 10.000 jobs and livelihoods lost its pretty clear to me.
To the economy as a whole. At the end of the day you're still having workers twiddle their thumbs not doing anything productive, with no incentive to move onto another job where they'll actually be doing something useful. We should weigh this against the workers' economic security, but let's not pretend that keeping workers around is some sort of free lunch.