Because fuck you, that's why. Pretty much what it boils down to. A lot of executives hated that employees got so much power during the pandemic (even though it's still miniscule compared to the power the executives have themselves) and they couldn't wait to take it back away from them. Now that there's a bit of a downturn (at least in tech jobs), they're taking advantage of it to force things back to the way it used…
> Nevermind it's completely unnecessary and damaging to the planet I mean the list of things like this is a mile long and nobody cares about doing a damn thing until helping the planet happens to align with something they really like.
To throw a hopefully not that controversial of an example out there, how about the obligation of gift giving and wrapping paper (and lets throw company swag in there, while we're at it). Tons of people give dumb or destined to be unused crap just to meet a societal expectation of giving gifts. I got a whole box of crap from my company as a welcome gift. I use maybe one item from it, the rest are just sitting in the house and will be trashed at some point. And I had to throw away yet another garbage bag of wrapping paper this past Christmas because it's expected to wrap gifts.
But that's the norm, and there hasn't been an established new normal yet. So it's not nearly as infuriating (to me at least) as this intentional clawing back of remote work to stroke the egos of executives.