The studios who are laying people off are the studios with hundreds or thousands of employees with multiple projects active at any given time. No, it’s not gig work. Even small studios working on one project generally don’t do this. When one project is done, the next one is through pre-production and ready for development to begin usually, or they’ll have a break. Usually keeping employees happy and loyal will be more effective than training new employees every time a project starts. It’s stupidly inefficient to do that.

Plus, that shouldn’t be acceptable almost anywhere. People should be able to have stable lives with reliable incomes and locations. Expecting anything else is horrible for the workers lives.