I think a lot of people are talking past each other. I’ve mostly WFH since long before the pandemic, in many different capacities at many companies. A lot of people have tunnel vision and the reality is more nuanced than most allow.
For IC work that requires minimal collaboration, WFH is often more productive. Fewer interruptions, more focus. However, when the role requires detailed collaboration and regular interaction with others, productivity for WFH falls off a cliff. This has been measurable at every company I’ve worked for that does a decent job of collecting these metrics. And anecdotally, I can feel it in my own job. When I am doing focus work, WFH is great and I get a lot done. When I need a lot of whiteboard time or deep discussions with my peers, WFH is very inefficient regardless of the remote setup, and the difference is so stark that it is difficult to argue.
I think most people are talking their own book. If you are an IC or mostly just do individual focus work, then of course WFH is great. If you need to iteratively collaborate with people on complex design problems or work products, WFH objectively has low efficiency in every organization I’ve seen try it, including companies that are remote-centric.
There is a lot of motivated reasoning in these discussions and little acknowledgement that productivity between WFH and RTO varies greatly depending on the task at hand. Every company and most roles are a mix of these types of tasks. I think many companies these days recognize this and try to allocate accordingly, but it creates legal, social, and other issues if you treat employees differently in this regard based on the nature of their roles. The reality that some people must commute to do their jobs effectively creates a class system of sorts but organizations needs all roles to be setup to ensure reasonable productivity.
This is not a black and white situation, it is a complex social problem.