At the risk of injecting recent US politics into this, the shipyard I used to work at had five employees laid off under DOGE and replaced by the exact same individuals (there aren't actually that many naval architects in the US), now working as contractors at a higher base pay. I feel like there's a lot of that out there.
This is extremely common at govenments in the Netherlands as well.
The defense and security-related sector is legendary for this. I had a friend who worked at a three-letter agency ~20 years ago who saw multiple colleagues quit, get hired by contractor firms and sold back to the agency to work on the exact same projects they had been working on as employees. They got a 2-3x pay bump, and the government paid 3-5x for their services. In one instance, my friend said, a guy clocked out on a Friday and came back to his exact same desk on Monday, with a new "employer" and a higher salary.