Laid off, should I be upfront about this when reaching out to people?

With outside people (e.g. regular engineers you're looking to get a referral from), yes, I think it's good to be open about it. It will get you sympathy which hopefully leads to a higher willingness to help.

With the hiring loop (recruiter, hiring manager), I don't think you should be open about it. If they ask why exactly you left your previous company, you can mention that you were part of a reduction in force, but definitely don't volunteer that information upfront.

My answer has changed a lot since 2 years ago. Back then, the layoffs were much bigger and random. The economy was worse. If you were laid off back then, people generally thought that the cut was necessary for the company to survive and it wasn't your fault.

Nowadays, layoffs are tinged with stack rank, PIP, and low performance energy. We saw this recently with the Meta layoff and the Intuit one before. Even if you were a high performer at the company, the hiring loop will assume that there's some chance you're a bad engineer and were laid off because of that.

The truth doesn't matter when it comes to discrimination, and that's what a lot of surviving (and getting) interviews is - Avoiding discrimination.

Here's another similar thread, relevant even if performance-related reasons aren't applicable to you (just covers generally good communication techniques to shield yourself): "How do I pursue recruiters if I was fired from my previous job?"