I won’t pretend I know what the ideal solution is, but lowering salaries across the board doesn’t seem like a great choice. If someone is a high performing employee and then sees a cut to their paycheck, that’s an incentive for them to leave, and that’s also extra bad for the company because of course better performing employees will be more capable of finding another job. With layoffs, companies remove their “worst” employees instead, which theoretically improves productivity, assuming of course the rest of the company doesn’t think they’ll get laid off too.
Reducing salaries opens a whole new can of worms with legal and immigration involved. Basically, if you hire someone on a visa, it is going to be a hassle to reduce their salaries - and the knock on effects could include restarting the immigration process. It might end up costing more than the dollars saved, and employees will likely leave anyway.