Business air travel, overall, will probably never come back. More meetings will be online; only for really important ones will people actually take an airplane. With more people working at home, there may not be an office to meet at. You'd have to book a conference center.
Probably your employer did it because they were allocated that amount in the annual budget and had to tick the box, but won't you as an employee prefer at least the stay to be extended by 3+ days for more meaningful interaction. Conversely won't it be better to cancel it altogether and pass 30% of the savings to you, the employee ?
I think it was more multi-faceted than that. For a while, 747 and 380 served the "hub and spoke" model, where giant planes would fly a gazillion of passengers between the hub cities, and smaller aircraft would distribute smaller quantities of passengers to their actual destinations. This worked especially well for Airbus and their European customer base, which invested in their mega-hubs in AMS, LHR and MUC.
Boeing's 787 Dreamliner was a surprising success (maybe even for Boeing itself), as lighter materials like carbon fiber got cheaper, and allowed for a medium-size plane to ferry passengers between some very distant (but overall not very well-trafficked) pairs like LAX-Warsaw or NYC-Oslo, eliminating the need for an overlay in a hub. All that at a fairly competitive cost per seat per mile.
A bunch of carriers suddenly had a Dreamliner-centric business strategy that undercut the old-school hub-and-spoke rivals. Norwegian and ANA come to mind - convenient direct connections between city pairs that are not that popular. And the market share those carriers aimed for frequently belonged to the airlines that bought 747s and 380s.