I am tired of hearing banalities about remote working

You have a very one sided view of what true friendship is and how they are built. It's difficult to build stable and lasting friendships fully remotely without constant IRL interactions where you get to experience all sides of the person and the relationship, including the darker sides, which you might not like. Constant IRL interactions in both fun and in challenging situations help you see all sides of a person, the good and the bad, vs online where people have a much more curated and groomed presentation of themselves especially when not fully anonymized. Maybe your online buddy is some weirdo who stalks girls in his free time or scams old people of their money. IRL you have a much better chance of sniffing weirdos out from their general behavior and by observing how they interact with others, not just with you, which is how I dumped a lot of so called friends who despite treating me well personally, I realized they were scumbags in general to others. Online you can't really screen for this.

Just think about where the strongest life lasting bonds are usually made by people: school, university, military service, sometimes work, etc., places where you're constantly together sharing a common struggle through which you build life lasting camaraderie and get to know people thoroughly and having each other's backs, along with a dose of willingness to self-sacrifice for a vulnerable friend in need. Just ask people who served about the bonds they made there. If your friends aren't willing to make themselves uncomfortable for you when in need, then they aren't your real friends. We all know "those people" who're great at having a good time and will always party with you, and keep saying you're "bros" but the moment you need some sort of help, they'll ghost you or make up excuses why they can't help. Those are just fun buddies, not friends. Same with your exclusively online gaming buddies, work colleagues, etc. are just that, gaming buddies and work colleagues, not friends. They'll have fun with you while things are good, but won't sacrifice anything IRL for you when things are bad for you like a true friend would. You need to make distinctions between fun buddies, and real friends which tends to be mostly formed IRL and will also be by your side when things are bad for you.

Saying people you know remotely are your friends is like saying the girl on tinder you've been chatting up for weeks is your girlfriend, when you haven't even met IRL.

Sure, in this day and age you can meet very interesting people online, on reddit, etc witch which you share many things in common and you can end up getting to know them well and share secrets and many intimate details of your life, and yet we still have a loneliness epidemic of epic proportions despite this. That's because once people with exclusivity remote friends switch off their laptop/phone and come back to the real world, they realize that despite all their so called friends, at the end of the day when they're vulnerable and in need, they're still 100% alone.

Its not that wfh is better in every case, but it does seem to be the case for a large number, if not majority, of people. The other issue is that the office crowd is dependent on others being at the office. I can't count the number of times I've seen someone say they prefer going to the office, but because everyone was working from home, there was no point. The burden being placed on others to satisfy personal work preferences seems heavily asymmetric, with the in-office crowd requiring a large number of others to also come into the office to make it work. If a company can make both work-styles viable, that's great. But too often it seems like the requirements for a bustling in-office environment end up meaning the WFH crowd are forced to come in as well.

Thank you for your well thought out reply!

You introduced a few new terms, "true friends(hip)", "fun buddies", "weirdo", "work colleagues", "gaming buddies", "tinder girlfriend", "real friends", "interesting people online, on reddit, etc witch[sic] which you share many things in common and you can end up getting to know them well and share secrets and many intimate details of your life".

What we're disagreeing about is that you're using the word friends only to refer to "true friends", and everyone outside of the group is decidedly not a friend, while I'm using the word friend to refer to basically anyone in my life that I've connected with that bears me no ill will, while still recognizing that the different categories defined exist and are distinct, just as a subset of the superset called friends.

We're not really going to reconcile that difference in definition, but I do want to say that I think we agree on the important point - everybody should have true friends that will back you when you're at your most vulnerable and when you're in need.