Nobody minds if that's what works for you. We object when you force it on employees because it's what works for you, regardless of what works for them.
It seems large groups from both sides are unwilling to meet in the middle.
And that's for good reason, really. The reality is that in-office workers have an inherent advantage when it comes to activities that require interaction between people, such as promotions or work assignments. People who want to work remotely are going to want everyone to work remote so that they aren't disadvantaged when it comes to those things, but then we are left with the problem of one group forcing their way of working on the other group.
I don't think those two things are an inherent advantage, rather, it's the reality of managers that don't understand how to remote work.
If "work assignments" require in-person communication, it seems like something is severely broken with your work assignment system and/or process. For software development, to me, that is basically tickets, kanban/scrum/whatever, and the regular communication that takes place to discuss. This communication doesn't need to be "in-person" to work, which brings me to the next point: meetings.
Having remote people exposes many problems with meetings. One is having too many meetings, ad-hoc meetings, or agenda-less meetings. These are problems in-person too, but they're not as directly noticeable.
The other meeting problem comes more from how the meetings take place. The most remote-friendly orgs have a rule like "one person remote, everyone remote" which basically means everyone does the meeting with a webcam and headset, even if they're in the office. At a minimum, meeting rooms need good audio/video (as in: no PSTN speakerphones, and no laptop mics or webcams allowed), and all meeting invites are always sent with an online meeting URL, at a minimum the day before.
There can be inherit advantage in being in-person both for ad-hoc technical discussions and building personal relationships, but if those are job advantages I think it's also a management failure. Ad-hoc technical discussions should quickly be moved online and inclusive of remote people, and that's something a manager should be constantly encouraging/enforcing. It should also without saying that a manager that favors employees for promotions with whom they have better personal relationships isn't doing their job properly (and note this isn't directly a "remote worker" problem).
Ah, really great point. Hadn't considered that
I think I'm a bit old school. My outlook can be summed up like this: If you like your job, and you want to keep your job, you'll do what your boss asks unless it's illegal or immoral.
So if my boss told me I had to work in an office, I'd weight that against the "if you want to keep your job" portion of the above, and decide if that's for me. If not, I quit and go find something where WFH is an option. If so, I go work in the office. Most likely I'd work in the office until I found something else or management realized that they were losing employees and changed the policy (I suppose in that way we can "force" the business to conform to our whims).
Perhaps that's a privileged point of view, or makes me a drone. But my life isn't work; I work to live, not live to work, so minor inconveniences at work don't derail my life; it's just a job, something I do to afford more important things.
For the record, I've worked from home for the last 9 years, and I have coworkers who had a really tough time adapting to WFH; they had to weigh if the trouble to change was worth it for them. Some felt it wasn't worth the trouble and left, many found it was and stayed.
My last org had a really bad wfh policy, inconsistently enforced across teams. I ended up leaving over it (mostly). There are a lot of things that won't get done because I'm not around to do them, and they'll lose a good bit of money over it. Seems like a weird hill for them to die on, but they did so. I wish they hadn't.
As an employee your primary obligation is not to your boss, but to the owners of the company.
If your boss is ordering you to do something that is detrimental to the company, you should fix the situation. But not necessarily follow the orders of your boss.
This is a very common misconception, imo.