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At least in my state, if your employment is terminated for poor performance, the employer can deny unemployment insurance claims.

Which in itself is a total bullshit rule. What, so people who are bad at a certain job don't deserve help while they find a job they're better at?

Seems like it would also have the effect of making the employee less appealing to any potential future employers. When asked in an interview why they left their previous job, these people have to decide whether to say honestly that they were let go because of mismanagement and risk their possible new job on whether the background check includes a call to the HR department of your last employer, or give the line that would match the HR record and say they were fired for poor performance. Either way is going to make it pretty hard to get hired, and so if Cloudflare ever needs to hire again in the future, there's a decent chance these people will still be seeking employment.

That's a gross and very American thing to do

While you can complain about the US having weak labor protection, I can tell you that, based on her description, is already illegal, and I have worked at two other companies in the US that take this very seriously. They almost never "fired" anyone but sadly did layoffs fairly often. They gave the appropriate notice and paid the promised severance. Even people that folks would have said deserved a during often got to hang out until the next layoff, because generally the risk of a labor law violation was not worth the notice and severance cost.

Over the last couple of decades working at companies, I have only seen four firings, but many many layoffs.

The four firing were: A guy that would show up for the morning meeting every day then leave work right after, hoping no one would notice. Fired after doing this for a week, getting a talking to to let him know we knew, then he kept doing it for another week before getting fired.

A guy who, in his first week, was on camera stealing 30 thousand dollars of equipment. He returned the equipment and the employer didn't even press charges.

A guy that would be at work, but do nothing but play with the equipment without ever doing a single thing he was asked. He lasted about 4 months before they finally gave up.

A guy who was walking around the parking lot yelling about how he was going to kill everyone while waving a pistol around.

We can blame both. Yes I do blame our shit labor laws, but they're shit because half of our country thinks (or claims to think) that corporations can self-regulate and will naturally operate in the best interests of the population. We do what we can on that front, but we shouldn't let companies get away with shitty behavior just because they aren't being forced to do the right thing. The more evidence of misconduct, the better.

As a comment, in some "elsewhere" places (Spain) they don't need to pay the notice weeks if they fire you in the first 3-6-12 or whatever was the testing period.

You don't need to give them notice either. At least in normal Spanish contracts. However, in Spain you are always elegible for unemployment salary (4 months for every worked year, when you file for it iirc), what you would not get is the severance, in case the dismissal was "fair" (despido procedente). Any Spanish worker that is unemployed and didn't leave their work willingly can file for unemployment salary, which is then given to them as 4 months of salary for every worked year, up to 2 years.

The only case when you might get unemployment salary denied is if you left your job, you were then hired by a company and they fired you after a day. This smells like you had a pact with the second company just so you got the salary, which is obviously fraud.