My company laid off about 50 strong employees, then opened about 55 roles with higher salaries. Now the people who were laid off and those of us who stayed have to compete for them. What is management trying to do?

TL;DR: My company laid off around 50 people from a group that was always described as "highly new and impactful." At the same time, they posted about 55 new jobs with better salaries, and now the employees who were laid off, the employees who weren't cut like me, and a huge number of external applicants are all competing for them in something that feels like a corporate survival contest. The whole thing seems expensive, confusing, and devastating for morale. What does the company gain by doing it this way?

The current situation:

A large part of my direct team and the teams we work with were affected. These are not low performers or people who were checked out. Many of them have been here for years and have always delivered. My own role has been rewritten into something I have almost no interest in, even though my background is almost perfectly suited to several of the positions that have just opened.

The timeline:

About four years ago, they brought in a new senior executive to lead our org.

At the beginning of this year, that executive announced a "restructuring" that would include "contraction and expansion." No one said layoffs outright, but we all knew what that meant.

About a month ago, they announced the layoff. Dozens of people were affected and given a notice period. At almost the same time, a lot of new postings appeared, most of them with completely new job titles.

We are all being "encouraged" to apply for the new roles. The part that doesn't make sense to me: they opened them to internal and external candidates at the same time. They also held a meeting where they showed us the number of applications that had come in. Many roles already have hundreds of applicants, and a few roles are approaching 1,200.

My questions / where I'm stuck:

Why cut strong people? Leadership was always praising this group for producing some of the most valuable and forward-looking work the company had seen in a long time. Why dismantle the team that did that?

Why not move people into the new roles first? If the company has good employees and its needs have now changed, why not create the roles and give the current staff a real path into them? Why make people with a proven track record compete against hundreds of strangers for jobs that seem built around the work we were already doing?

What is the point of showing off applicant numbers? That meeting felt less like transparency and more like a pressure tactic. As if they were saying: "Look how replaceable you are." It landed very badly. Some of my colleagues who were laid off are so upset about the whole thing that they're planning to take the severance and not even bother applying.

I'll probably need to apply to some of these roles if I want my work life to be tolerable, but it's hard to feel motivated when I feel like a pawn in a game no one wants to explain. Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.