40% increase isn't even that bad compared to some I've seen.
I saw that before the recent layoffs at Discord their employee headcount had grown 5x since 2020, and after the layoffs they're merely at 4x their size of 2020
It doesn't actually have any real impact and there are plenty of counter example, but the fact that Activision is a 40+ years old company who slowly grew to that number before jumping 40% in two years for no reason (no major shift, new product or anything like that, no "we own the world" like microsoft, ...) somehow makes it feel way worse to me that yet another not even a decade tech company that grew crazy for the numbers.
The overhiring during covid really went insane in a lot of places