This matches something I see from the other side of the desk. These decisions almost never get made as a decision. Nobody convenes a meeting to discuss replacing Diane’s role. It shows up as a line in next year’s budget: don’t backfill the req when she retires, the new phone system handles routing now, headcount in that department drops by one. It gets approved as a cost line, not named as what it actually is.

The deindustrialization comparison is right, but a factory closing at least forced someone to stand up and announce it. This version never reaches anyone’s desk who’s thinking about Diane at all. It just gets smaller, quietly, inside a spreadsheet, one attrition at a time, with nobody in the room who’s read what you just wrote.