The reason contractors and consultants have silly requirements like this placed on them is because they’re service providers, not employees. The managers are the customers in this arrangement, and customers often want silly things, like your physical presence in the office, because perhaps that just makes them feel better, and it’s fine if some silly thing makes your customer feel better.
The broader issue he’s talking about is simply the inefficiency of large organisations. There are many things that start to become much less efficient the more you scale up the size of an organisation, including risk management. This is because the feedback loops between decision and outcome starts to get much longer, the causal relationship between decision and outcome starts to become much more blurry, the distance between decision maker and impacted user gets bigger, and management starts to be comprised of less leaders and more bureaucrats.
Not only is this unavoidable, but it’s a good thing. Large businesses benefit from the economies of scale, but smaller organisations get to compete with them, because smaller organisations have the potential to be orders of magnitude more efficient than large ones. It also creates market opportunities for other B2B companies to come along and address some of their efficiency issues. I’ve done lots of consulting and contractor work, and one of the primary factors that drives demand for my services is enterprise inefficiency. Even if you put aside any consideration for how slow they are to adapt to new technology, a lot of demand for my contracts has been driven by strict corporate salary bands. The board sets the maximum rate that an engineer is allowed to be paid, and any team in the company that requires skills that the market has priced above that rate can only access them through external contractors/consultants. I’d bet the same is true for the OP, even if they don’t know it, so perhaps they shouldn’t be so quick to deride enterprise inefficiency.