Anyone let go right now - it sucks - but it isn't you that sucks. It is the monkeys that are managing the pandemic that suck.
Keep your chin up!
Where I worked, 200 people working on two products at a start up became 100 people working on 1 product at a startup all in the course of a single morning, and the people working on the product that got the axe were just as smart as the people working on the product that didn't.
Some of them didn't work for years - all smart capable developers, but no one was hiring. It's sort of surprising that didn't happen this year, but the next crisis is always right around the corner.
It's all fun and games until it happens to you.
1. Sometimes talent is hard to recognize, as in the people that you listed.
2. Sometimes the whole company is such a bad situation that they have to fire whole teams/branches indiscriminately.
But still, I think that parent comment about "a lot of talented people being out of work for a long time" is not true.
I would say that's most of the time. Companies often have to outsource their head-hunting because so many of them are so bad at it, and entire companies have been created (e.g. TripleByte) because other companies can't figure out how to properly measure talent.
And arguably, the main reason in the first place that managers hire so many people they are OK letting go later on is because their managers (one level up) aren't able to properly observe it happening, on account of the measurement being so poor. If the measurement is that poor, you're basically guaranteed to have hired lots of great people who won't have the opportunity to flourish.
The codicil is that I'm not sure you can separate someone's productivity from their fit in that role, with the given management and stage of the company.
