Back with the DotCom boom, there was an attempt to make the workplace a "club" - a place to hang out. Beer bashes, pool, foosball, ping pong tables... all of that. Yea, I'll grant its nice to relax to... but if you're staying late to play foosball with a coworker, that's the encroachment.
It may have made us more productive - gotten a few more hours a week of work in or kept some of the more vagabond-esque engineers around for a few more months.
But it also made the workplace a place to be rather than the third place and in doing so, also took some of the other things that the third place was too... but the workplace does the third place poorly... and it can't do it well.
The third place needs to be a neutral ground with no ties to those who are there. The coffee shop book club doesn't force anyone to be there. But the workplace, you need to be there for a pay check. If the book club gets bad, you can leave - not so with the workplace.
The third place needs to be level - with no status beyond "regular". The workplace has managers and leads and HR... it has CEOs and founders and a legal department.
While the workplace are sometimes saying "we are a community" - we know in our orgchearts that HR is there to protect the company, not organize book clubs and beer tastings.
This has become even more of an issue with the pandemic-wfh. The traditional third places are closed, or have limits on how many people can be there at once - and you've got to be 6' away from the other people. So we've got virtual third places. Some of the slack channels that I'm on have lit up over the past year.
And so, those companies that have encroached the most in the past are seeing it even more now. Where before the water cooler discussions of five minutes of politics are now immortalized in slack channels and message boards. Where people who would like to go to the coffee shop and pontificate about the wrongs of the workplace and politics are now forced to do it on message boards and slack channels.
Those companies that have gone further into the third places but don't have the ability to moderate the tone or power differentials are seeing it more. Those companies where the power gradient from most distant worker to the CEO is the steepest are even more likely to see it.
Larger orgs, with offices, can more easily move people who discuss and disrupt with politics further apart. Those smaller ones that are all remote? where everyone is on the same slack channel? Where the most distant employee to the CEO is only one or two managers apart? Yea... they're more likely to have trouble when the third place norms get too established in the company.
I'm not at all surprised to see this.