Pretty much. In a prior role I didn't have a real job any longer but the people making the decisions for a fairly small layoff probably didn't know that. Would have been happy to have taken a decent severance package. Hung out for a while more or less.

I thought it's also mostly to preserve feeling, to obscure the connection between performance and layoff to ease employee transition to another job. That's why sometimes it's a branch all at once from the middle to bottom.