I'm not sure the Cavs have done either of those under Altman.
They certainly haven't gutted payroll. They've reduced it from "whoa, Dan, that's a big fucking luxury tax check you're gonna write!" to just below the luxury tax threshold (they're less than $1 million below it after the big trade this week). But they haven't slashed and burned payroll like many rebuilding teams do.
As for picks -- they have collected some, but they've never had a giant war chest under Altman. There haven't been any deals where they took on mega-salary to get a crack at the lottery, like when the Cavs got the pick that became Kyrie in exchange for taking on Baron Davis's anchor of a contract. Koby did trade for firsts from Houston (which became Windler), Detroit (KPJ), and Milwaukee (the pick that they sent out earlier this week) -- none of those picks will be higher than the late 20s, now that Giannis is returning to the Bucks.
They've also had shit for lottery luck. None of their lotto picks (either their own or the one they got from Boston in the Kyrie deal) moved up in the lottery; it's only been down.
As much as anything, I chafe when fans act as though the good things a GM does are assumed away ("anybody could have done that"), while every bad decision is magnified. Given the available talent, Koby has drafted well. (Compare his record to Chris Grant's. At least when Koby swings for the fences on a SG with attitude problems, he does it with the 30th overall pick, not the 4th.) He's made some positive trades. I'll give you that hiring Beilein was a bad move; but if we're gonna roast him for that, then we have to praise him for getting Bickerstaff here as AHC, and for turning the reins over to him when they parted ways with Beilein just a few months after he was hired.
2.5 years after LeBron left, Koby has assembled a nice core of young talent (Sexton, Garland, Okoro, KPJ, and Allen are all 22 or younger; Drummond, Prince, Nance, Osman, Windler, and Dotson are all in the 24-27 range). They'll likely have another lottery pick this summer. I like where they are headed.