Still, probably proportionally less layoffs in MSR than the rest of the company overall during these cuts. The insinuation was that Microsoft is shuttering Research entirely, which is very far from true.
I read the comment "what about them?" along with the poorly headlined link, as insinuating that Microsoft Research was being shut down. If someone thought that Silicon Valley was their main lab or didn't know either way, that headline would easily give the mistaken impression that Microsoft was canning the whole endeavor. My apologies to rasz_pl if I mistook his/her meaning.
For what it's worth, MSR historically hasn't been beholden to find commercial applications for their work. If anything, it's usually disappointing how much really cool stuff they come up with that isn't ever productized in an accessible way.