I don't know whether you're making this statement about Amazon, in which case I have no insight and you can stop reading now, or whether that's intended as a more general statement.

If it's the latter, I'd like to challenge the assertion that a PIP is necessarily the company trying to get rid of someone. In my experience as a manager, I've always made sure that PIPs are as honestly designed to get people back on track as could be. In, say, the last five years as a manager, and in my organisation of a couple hundred engineers, there were exactly two cases (and the key point is that I recall both specifically) where a PIP was primarily motivated to document the already extremely obvious (to anyone far and wide) underperformance and attitude problem. And even then, the managers in question had the professionalism to design the PIP to be eminently achievable.

Generally speaking, I find the likelihood of a PIP to be adversarial and/or a tool to be able to fire somebody to be much more strongly connected to whether there has been an adversarial relationship between the employee and their manager. For that reason, I found that it paid off hugely to make sure people move to different teams & managers and get a reset there before taking any drastic action. In the same way as people are said to leave due to their managers, not jobs, it's key to take that personal component out of a bad situation.

I've known people who've survived pips. Usually it's because their manager was bad and wanted more brown nosing. Happens now and then at the L6 manager level.

And those people who use that as a blanket statement for the entire industry are objectively wrong. There are a handful of things being on a PIP could mean.

1. You're not really trying because you're used to the work being relatively easy. It means you need to actually try, and barring evidence to the contrary, you have no reason to believe you'll be fired if you shape up.

2. You're trying your hardest and the work just isn't good enough. This is a bad sign, and you'll likely fail to meet the requirements of the PIP so you should start looking.

3. Your company is using a PIP to cover their ass for legal reasons. In the US, this makes no sense at all, especially for folks in the $170k+ total comp bracket, because you can be fired for any or no reason (barring certain protected classes). It's unlikely the company is going to spend $100k to cover their ass if you don't fall into a protected class.

I have seen multiple folks at multiple companies put on PIPs both formal and informal, and I have never seen it used as a cover for someone to get let go.

Or just another way for a manager to prevent you from changing your team or not give hike.

My understanding is that incompetence is not a justifiable cause for firing and denying unemployment benefits. The fire-able behavior has to be "intentional" in most states.

My wife and I own a business in a rather pro-employer state and even our DOL does not consider being bad at your job just cause for denying unemployment. We had an employee use company resources to actively plan opening a competing business half a mile away and still lost our request that he be denied unemployment benefits after we fired him for gross misconduct.

If you get unemployment benefits denied, especially in a very pro-employee state like California or New York, you certainly did something to justify it.