There's a lot of employee travel at big companies. Many times of the year you can hardly book a hotel room around Mountain View/Sunnyvale/Palo Alto. I think the pandemic has shown how non-essential a lot of that really was.
I think the "your boss expects/forces you to" interpretation from the grand parent isn't generally what happens (at Google). I haven't seen that at all. It's rather more common that you realize on your own that a certain amount of travel is highly effective for building and maintaining the relationships you need to do your job.
This is extremely strongly correlated with your distance from HQ and with the seniority of your position in the company.
For what it's worth, I hold a reasonably senior role (at Google) in EMEA and I'm living off of the relationships I built in the two years prior to the pandemic. I traveled nearly 25% of the time then. Ask your nearest director+ in EMEA engineering and they'll recognize this at least in principle. This is likely to be very similar in other companies that are globally distributed but with a strong epicenter somewhere. I don't think it's particularly Google specific except in that Google engineering isn't very top down/command-and-control, so relationships in a complex org are an even more important tool for getting things done than they would be in a more hierarchical environment.
ie, sales would work equally well if everyone did it via Zoom calls. But if one competitor is willing to send reps in-house for in-person meetings, and the rest are just scheduling Zooms... I can see the industry quickly collapsing back into constant sales travel, if there's even a small marginal gain from face-to-face meetings
(or dinners, or drinks, or whatever else sales reps do to close a deal)
Gyms have been closed for many months, but that doesn't seem to imply that exercising is not important.
100k employees, each spending 10k/year on business travel... $1B.
The company could choose not to spend this money even without COVID, but it normally chooses to spend it, presumably because it considers the benefits worth it.
Personally, the difference in working atmosphere before and after I visited coworkers from a different country was massive, and likely well worth the travel expenses for the company.
On site employment, car loans and car payments, expensive rent in poorly managed or unsustainable counties—the potential for behavioral change is enormous.