Pharaoh's whole policy had one aim — shrink the Hebrews. And this verse is the Targum's quiet demolition of the whole policy.
"But as much as they depressed them, so much they multiplied, and so much they prevailed, and the Mizraee were troubled in their lives before the sons of Israel."
The Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Exodus (1:12) keeps the Hebrew's paradox but sharpens it. The Mizraee — the Egyptians themselves — are troubled in their lives. It is not merely that Israel multiplied. It is that the Egyptians felt their own lives become unbearable in the shadow of a people they could not diminish.
This is one of the deep laws of oppression the sages returned to again and again across our <a href='/categories/midrash-aggadah.html'>Midrash Aggadah collection</a> (4,400+ texts). A tyrant's effort to crush a people meets an equal and opposite spiritual force. The more Pharaoh afflicted, the more babies were born. The more work he piled on, the stronger their backs became. His cruelty was not shrinking Israel — it was composting them.
And the tyrant feels it. The Mizraee are troubled in their lives. Oppression does not only ruin the oppressed. It ruins the oppressor's sleep, his appetite, his marriage, his capacity for joy. The slave builds the city; the tyrant builds the prison cell inside his own chest.
Beloved, when the pressure of the world increases, do not assume the pressure is winning. Sometimes the soul is simply multiplying in the dark.