It was forced on most businesses from the pandemic, you're right they never wanted it. Acting like businesses should honor it forever is a bad take too, like businesses should ignore what worked previously in favor of what doesn't work as well. It's really just about removing friction, remoteness can cause friction. Not many managers care about trying to adapt, if you require fully remote that's great, you're free to go find it. You need to do what's right for you just like the management is trying to do what's best for the business. It's not some butts in chairs power trip though, maybe that's been your experience with a bad manager, but (practically) nobody at the C level making these strategic decisions is concerned with that part. They just know/feel the business is more cohesive and healthier when people are together in an office. Sometime there needs to be creativity and collaboration, not just checking off a task list. If your job involves checking off task lists, it's likely you're in too tactical of a vantage point to have much of an opinion of the company's strategic interests. An in any case, there's a lot of other intangibles around being connected with your coworkers IRL. You may not have interest in that, but things like employee retention and engagement are higher when these relationships are deeper. Employee's care more about the company when engaged. So on.
That said, I feel most management teams have settled on being hybrid, where working in office is fluid, or perhaps standardized on a few days a week. I think everyone sees value in that approach, there's usually a happy medium is my opinion. But fully remote doesn't work well for a lot of larger complex orgs.