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Having worked in aerospace, layoffs were regular events, and one thing we all noted was that the "strategy" varied every time. Sometimes, lay off the high-paid; sometimes, clear out the junior staff.

I found little published on how to downsize, and who's to say that most of it isn't just a short-term boost to "the numbers" with little analysis of the real effect.

This is interesting: From HBR.
https://hbr.org/2018/05/layoffs-that-dont-break-your-company
Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company
Better approaches to workforce transitions

Why Layoffs Are Ineffective

Today layoffs have become a default response to an uncertain future marked by rapid advances in technology, tumultuous markets, and intense competition.Yet other data on layoffs should give companies pause. In a 2012 review of 20 studies of companies that had gone through layoffs, Deepak Datta at the University of Texas at Arlington found that layoffs had a neutral to negative effect on stock prices in the days following their announcement. Datta also discovered that after layoffs a majority of companies suffered declines in profitability, and a related study showed that the drop in profits persisted for three years. And a team of researchers from Auburn University, Baylor University, and the University of Tennessee found that companies that have layoffs are twice as likely to file for bankruptcy as companies that don’t have them.

After a layoff, survivors experienced a 20% decline in job performance. All too frequently, senior managers dismiss such findings. Some argue that since companies do layoffs because they’re already in bad shape, it’s no surprise that their financial performance may not improve. Layoffs are so embedded in business as a short-term solution for lowering costs that managers ignore the fact that they create more problems than they solve.

Companies that shed workers lose the time invested in training them as well as their networks of relationships and knowledge about how to get work done. Even more significant are the blighting effects on survivors. Charlie Trevor of University of Wisconsin–Madison and Anthony Nyberg of University of South Carolina found that downsizing a workforce by 1% leads to a 31% increase in voluntary turnover the next year. Meanwhile, low morale weakens engagement. Layoffs can cause employees to feel they’ve lost control: The fate of their peers sends a message that hard work and good performance do not guarantee their jobs. A 2002 study by Magnus Sverke and Johnny Hellgren of Stockholm University and Katharina Näswall of University of Canterbury found that after a layoff, survivors experienced a 41% decline in job satisfaction, a 36% decline in organizational commitment, and a 20% decline in job performance.

While short-term productivity may rise because fewer workers have to cover the same amount of work, that increase comes with costs—and not only to the workers. Quality and safety suffer, according to research by Michael Quinlan at the University of New South Wales, who also found higher rates of employee burnout and turnover. Meanwhile, innovation declines. For instance, a study of one Fortune 500 tech firm done by Teresa Amabile at Harvard Business School discovered that after the firm cut its staff by 15%, the number of new inventions it produced fell 24%. In addition, layoffs can rupture ties between salespeople and customers. Researchers Paul Williams, M. Sajid Khan, and Earl Naumann have found that customers are more likely to defect after a company conducts layoffs. Then there’s the effect on a company’s reputation: E. Geoffrey Love and Matthew S. Kraatz of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign found that companies that did layoffs saw a decline in their ranking on Fortune’s list of most admired companies.