Many multinationals have a very long chain of middle managers between the CEO and the employee doing the actual work, aka "IC".

Corporations who noticed that and started to limit the number of middle managers in the chain to 11, this caused lower ranks of middle managers to only lose their managerial status in the system, while still remaining being managers with the same titles and compensation - "dark management" / "shadow management" ;)

I remember many years ago Intel fired sevral thousands of middle managers to shorten the command chain, and improve decision making.

I'm not surprised this is happening. Many org structures were pretty sparse as a result of changes, reorgs, attrition, and planning for future growth. When the growth slowed, stopped, or reversed, that meant those sparse trees weren't going to get filled in.

In my past life at one of those as a direct manager of ICs, I had 12 direct reports, while my manager, and their manager each had 4 or 5. There was definitely room to flatten things a bit. That said, 15-18 is far too many for a single manager to handle, IMHO. If you're managing ICs, you're still (hopefully) using your hands-on experience to provide guidance and mentorship and also staying in touch with technical discussions. With 18 reports, you're basically have no time to really dig into everything, and end up just being the performance monitor.

My company followed the lead of big tech when it came to stuff like remote work and layoffs, and I'm desperately waiting for them to do the same with this one. We currently have one EM and one PM for 4-6 engineers, plus more project managers, directors, VPs. This group of 30-40 managers in every division has nothing to do but set up meetings and create more useless work for everyone. Everything is stuck in a dozen committees. We haven't shipped anything of note in years, and yet people keep patting each other on the back for a job well done and getting promoted.

Microsoft did this in 2014. Didn‘t hurt.