> Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids.
tl;dr: Germany needs to heavily improve its rural/suburbs/general internet connectivity to encourage WFH. It can be insanely frustrating getting anything resembling modern internet in some places.
Speaking on the German situation as I recently experienced that (100% WFH moving out of the city center). I was looking for a flat in a radius of 100km around a city and was very flexible with where I ended up. I had two must-haves: dedicated office (as in, a spare room) plus reasonably fast and stable internet. For (my) remote work anything >= 50Mbit VDSL (roughly 50 down/10 up) is workable. 250/40 was my minimum when searching. I narrowed it down to two solid choices I wanted to check out: 1) rural village of about 20-50 houses and 2) suburbs/300m from city border of a smallish (~50k people) city.
It turned out 1) did not connect the fiber connection they could get (quite literally "I don't understand this and never needed it."). This combined with some other less than ideal things led me to discard 1).
When checking out 2) I found out they didn't connect the cable internet marked as available online ("It sits somewhere in the garden, we don't want to drill the house walls." Drilling the walls for the PV they put up before I moved in was fine...). But they had 250/40 VDSL available and I confirmed then and there that you get at least 100Mbit download.
I signed for 2) based on 100MBit+ VDSL plus liking the overall package (location, neighbors, landlord, flat). I could order 250/40, but two weeks later got a call that they could only offer me 16/1 (not a typo) due to "no available lines". I took that offer, because mobile network is either very expensive (Telekom 5G unlimited is 85€) or very unreliable (Telefonica 4G unlimited is 30€, but went down to 2MBit/s in some areas with full reception) and I needed at least some fallback connectivity. As a data point: Google meet can manage about 1 or 2 incoming video streams and spotty outgoing video at 16/1. I setup a multipath setup to combine Telefonica and the 16/1 land line.
It took me a better part of a month to finally convince support to send a technician out to address the problem that I was marked as offline in their system despite being connected. It turned out someone is blocking "my" line since about 3 years after moving out so I somehow can get a slow speed fallback, but nothing more. The technician belled out the line to the DSLAM, overrode the assignment and assigned the line "officially" to me. When we got talking he mentioned that he had to do the same "fix" the last time someone moved in and that he just expanded the DSLAM VDSL capacity. I had to wait about 30min for him to document that in the system and then order a faster connection before someone else snatches up that line. Which surprisingly worked out to a 250/40 landline finally.
In conclusion: it took me, a quite technical person who depends on the connection for work, about 2 months to get a workable landline after doing all possible due diligence before signing my lease. If I had not haunted support or got a less motivated technician, I would still be sitting here with blurry Google Meets. This is not how you motivate people to move back to rural areas. Based on my experience with 1) there are also problems the state can not tackle. If the landlords don't see the value in even letting a fiber provider lay a dark fiber in the basement, there is nothing the billions of digital infrastructure funding can do.
P.S. Beaming internet down from frigging space via Starlink costs less than Telekom 5G unlimited...
P.P.S. I know this is just a single data point, but the amount of locations I had to reject because of not even theoretical fast landlines was insane
EDIT to add: I am not even talking about 1GBit everywhere, just a floor of maybe 50/10 or even 100/20 (reliable!) so you can realistically WFH.