I think the pilots hired today are going to be furloughed. I don't think it's going to be a 12-year furlough like the last ones during the bankruptcies and mergers, but still.
That said, it is 100% better to be furloughed than not hired at all. Any airline. If you are furloughed you can do anything you want, non-flying and the airline will eventually bring you back and retrain you. Staying current is irrelevant. Then once you are recurrent you can go get hired wherever you want to apply to, and you are a much more desirable candidate.
Not being hired at all means you have to stay current *and* compete with the backlog of aspiring airline pilots when the interviews start again.
Remember these people are fools. They were convinced air travel would *never* recover from COVID-19, then they started talking about "winning" the pandemic recovery. Then they furloughed (at AA). Then they announced the biggest hiring wave in airline history. Now they are all cutting hiring projections, if not outright halting it. These clowns just blow with the wind, and so do our careers.