You are well familiar how the airlines selected and treated the redundancies. In particular the stories from around the sandbox shared here are shocking, but most likely not that obscenely worse compared to what has happend elsewhere too.
I smell incompetence and arrogance with a bit of bullying to cover anxiety among peers and in front the higher-ups, not wrongful intent per se. In that case, the hiring process actully cannot be any different.
Wish you will soon find an employer who can see it your way. There are places, however, where out of recency for more than 12 months becomes a serious and costly headache. As long as the operator has a choice of who to pick, don't blame them.
(After all, the smart, tactful and intelligent people went to become pilots anyway, right?)