> If you think offices are going away, you're betting against decades of history where people work together in meatspace
Historian here. If you're going to argue the past, then working together in close quarters at scale has only become a societal norm since the Industrial Revolution. Throughout most of (European) history, working from home was the norm.
This shifted when in the 19th century when industrialization moved the workplace for millions from small scale, artisanal home labor towards factories, workshops and crowded urban centers.
The impact on individuals and society was profound. This was also the time where factory workers found themselves facing extremely long workdays, non-existent worker rights, low wages and so on. That's what sparked social and emancipatory movements, and worker parties in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Throughout the 20th century, the workforce in the Northern hemisphere became increasingly more emancipated and educated. Post-war economic boom (1945-1975) and social-economic reforms - especially in Europe - created the momentum that turned a blue collar workforce into a white collar workforce.
Even so, in the late 20th century, many of the extant notions of how work ought to be organized were still firmly rooted in frameworks that first emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
Ever since the emergence of digital technology in the 1960s, visions of modernity and future living have always included the ability to work remotely or from home, rendering the centralized workplace obsolete. It's only now, 50 years later, that commoditization of digital technology has actually turned this into an option for millions of workers.
The problem isn't technology though, it's - still - the tenuous and complex relationship between workers and their employers that harks back towards demanding 40, 60, 80 hours in a centralized workplace where maximization of productivity is put front and center.
Now, in all of this, it should be clear that I'm not advocating for people to wholesale move towards working from home. Nor that people should go back to bare level subsistence living through local farming / artisanal production. That's not how this works.
In that regard, you're absolutely right to state there's "no one way" to organize work.
However, generalizing the notion that "people can't do their work virtually and need to see each other" is false as well as it doesn't take into account the historic backdrop that explains how modern society ended up organizing itself in a way that created centralized workplaces as a necessary requirement.
The fact of the matter is that the technology finally gives people a choice over the locality of their work. Artificially restricting that freedom for everyone because "That's how it has gone on for decades" or "some people in some industries can't work from home" are rather poor arguments in that regard.