If a corporation cannot be your friend, it also cannot be intentionally cruel. Those are two sides of the same coin.
Back in March, 2020, I was working for a small startup company. We were lucky, in that there was nobody in the company who could not work remotely. So, when covid rose, making the call to give everyone a bit of a budget for office furniture they might need, and send us all to work from home, was an easy one.
They also made us a promise - nobody was going to get laid off. They kept that promise for over two years. When the greatest danger had passed, and the economy had started picking back up, they had to trim down. This wasn't because they were cruel, or because they weren't our friends. It was because the company's financial run rate was just too high for the amount of business it was doing. They had to trim down or they'd not be paying anyone's salary.