There was a lot of "ooh, it will catastrophically fail within weeks", which was fundamentally an assumption that the previous team was entirely incompetent. (Any halfway decent team tries their hardest to build resilient systems, not things that need hand-holding all the time.)

The current trajectory is exactly on the expected failure path predicted by anybody who does actually work on large systems - a steady increase of smaller failures, punctuated by the occasional large failure. (Cf. DeSantis announcement)

In essence, a reduction in staff will result in worse SLO results. It will result in less coverage of edge cases (technical and UX). Smaller teams are more constrained to travel on "the happy path". And the fact that marginal utility of additional engineers decreases means you can usually reduce teams a lot before impacting that path.

In complex systems, reductions also mean you're more vulnerable to a black swan event being irrecoverable, but that still requires a black swan first.