Apple was on the verge of being bankrupt and had a ton of projects that were never going to go anywhere e.g. eMate, Newton, OpenDoc, Cyberdog. And they weren't contributing to revenue at all.
At Twitter we've seen the entire ethics, human rights, accessibility groups etc go. Which directly contributes to revenue since advertisers want these in place to mitigate brand safety risk.
In addition to the other context people mentioned (that Apple was in a very different state), Apple was also significantly larger than Twitter as a company with many , many more projects at hand spanning a much larger range of domains.
Apple had already laid off 2800 people the previous year, and Wall Street had already been expecting more layoffs. The article DHH cites even says the post-Jobs layoffs were less extensive than some had expected. The Twitter layoffs are far more severe.
Furthermore, the Apple layoffs were directly connected with the cancellation of specific projects. It was well known at the time that Apple was seriously overextended with huge, over-budget projects. The Next acquisition made some of these redundant. Jobs and Next brought a clear strategy for Apple and the base materials on which to execute that strategy.
DHH cites analysts with qualms about Apple's future and tries to compare them with coverage of Twitter today. But there's simply no comparing. If you read the contemporary coverage, nobody has any real concerns about Jobs. The critical ZDnet piece he quotes even acknowledges that the layoffs were necessary for survival. The theme of the skeptical analysis of the time was not "is he going too far", but "will it be enough".
DHH is right about one thing, though: "Twitter ain't Apple, Musk ain't Jobs".
https://world.hey.com/dhh/apple-fired-4-100-when-steve-jobs-...
This whole Twitter layoffs is so interesting. even DHH got something to say about it.