You cannot overstate the difficulty of putting in eight, or even six, solid hours of work in a day where you also have to coordinate your children's schooling, prepare meals, arbitrate disagreements, apply band-aids, do dishes, do laundry, supply technical support, and a thousand other non-work-related tasks. I was surprised that the article didn't mention this.
Especially considering that _nobody_ puts in eight or even six hours of "solid work" when at the office. That's something I intuitively knew for a while, but it came into stark contrast once I started consulting and tracking my time. I only bill for the time I _actually_ work. And doing 8 hours of mentally demanding, focused work per day is difficult AF. That's why people slack off in the office, have water cooler conversations, interrupt each other all the time, have meetings they don't really need to have, 1.5 hour lunch breaks, etc. If you had to actually work 8 hours a day, full throttle, few people would stick with it.
The flip side is the productivity of doing 8 hours of focused work per day is truly staggering when you tally it up at the end of the week (which I also do, and you should do, too, if you work remote - otherwise you'll be "invisible" no matter how much you contribute). And WFH plus mostly async communication is very amenable to being able to focus.
And like you said, few people stick with it. Every place I’ve worked at, the Support department has extremely high turnover and people constantly trying to leave for a different department in the company, or a different role in a different company. Being constantly monitored, poor pay, not being able to go to company sponsored events (oh, at 2 PM we’re having a Zoom workout/meditation meeting, everyone is invited *except support they gotta stay on the phone), having to be above certain metrics, and having to talk to people that are generally neutral at best and extremely pissed at worst, is the perfect recipe for people to hate their job and to quit/leave the company/go to a different department ASAP.
I think this varies by industry. It may not be possible to do intensive coding for 8 hours a day, but lawyers definitely bill 8, 10, or even more hours per day. For lawyers, this could mean a mix of reading briefs, consulting with colleagues, and writing memos. While you do have to be disciplined to bill nearly all of your hours at work, I definitely had months where I billed 10 hours per day every weekday and some weekends (and honestly — I do recognize that some lawyer pad their hours, but I wasn't one of them)
I've been managing fine by being available during the day, not stressing and just living in the moment. I get the heavy lifting done early in the morning or late at night. Just like in the office... my most productive hours have always been either before everyone else gets in or after everyone else goes home.