@fe That's because it's typical activity and timelines, folks have shared here before. The times of "no layoffs" at Walmart are long gone, they passed on much like many other aspects of OG Walmart culture.
The Original poster mentions a couple of scenarios, and while they may align with each other's cycle, they are very different in cause or purpose.
Individual Contributor Performance purges are very unlikely to happen in mass or without the pairing of another purge objective. Since evals are being done in the next couple of months, before end of fiscal year (Jan 31 for WM), this is needed to calculate any Bonus payout, and mid-year evaluations are nearly meaningless in all cases. Poor resource performance flags will align with a Feb or March purge, which will also align with a Company Poor Performance purge at the same time, that being a RIF due to low sales in Q4 and reduction of expenses, etc...
As for calibrations they mention, these are pretty much a farce. In nearly all areas of Tech, and a large portion of the business, organizations lack any real top-down goal setting, let alone any viable job skill competency metrics by which to measure or calibrate against. Take a role, identify what that role should do, then add the phrase Anything else asked of them. You could measure 2 developers in the same role designation and level, and in one area the developer may be tasked with Scrum duties, or some other administrative team or area responsibilities, while the other developer remains heads down and codes. Do they deliver the same quality of product, do they turn out the same quantity of product, does their product return the same ROI, all of these would be important to a real calibration, but none of this is viable since one is doing work outside of the role and in a calibration this can work for or against depending on the leadership. When roles are eliminated, like Project Managers, Scrum Masters, Analysts, Leads, the work they did does not go away, it simply shifts to be absorbed by remaining roles/resources and most times that will not be Managers or Directors.
The OP mentioned with calibration leadership will decide who they like and don't like, this is at the core of the issue, a very subjective and non-calibration process.
As for performance and listening to managers, in the past this was something that would be an obvious positive, but today, managers are unlikely capable of measuring performance by any meaningful metric, consistently between individuals, roles, projects etc... Add to this the very real fact that most area goals are non-existent or so vague and directionless, they serve no real purpose and offer no trickle-down alignment for individual contributors within an organization. Most years, Area Goals aren't ready to be propagated into the eval system to establish the Flavor of the Month, like OKR's . He-l, they can't even define real OKR's because they read about them in a book and didn't comprehend it's meaning. So, they try to shoehorn them in rather than a natural application of them within an organization.
That being said, nearly all of the thousands of layoffs in the past several years have had nothing to do with individual contributor performance. They can be directly linked to company performance (expense reduction), outside leadership coming into Walmart, changes in business strategies, outsourcing, and offshoring.
Layoffs are a core process of Walmart, AI will aid in the continued reorganizing, restructuring, and purging. Rinse, Repeat.