The New York Times - "Feel Bad About Everything, Always"
Remote work is amazing, net on net it vastly improves lives, reduces commute time / traffic / car pollution, reverses the decades long trend of economic activity centralizing in a few boom cities, and I believe will reduce inequality longterm as workers will be able to get good, high-paying jobs no matter where they live.
This would be a bad thing for them, if the New York Times sold the news, which I don't think they do any more. The New York Times instead sells brand image to people. They sell a series of a talking points, ideas, and topics that show you are in the in group and on the right side. So that when someone brings up remote work, you can show how empathetic you are, and how worldly you are and say "Remote work is fine but really it shows how the gains are captured by the few and not the many, I read in the Times that... ".
Boom cities were never the problem. The problem is commuting, which stems from a lack of housing.
Forcing everyone out of the cities creates a worse set of problems. It means more wasteful roads to nowhere and doubling down on our third-world transportation infrastructure. It means more clearing of wild land, one of the best resources the US has if you've done any traveling at all. It means more boom-bust bedroom communities and vacant strip malls. It means more culturally insulated communities and Trump-like politicians.
I think you'll find that a great many people don't want to live in the denser areas where offices often tend to be. You can scold about that all you want, but you could make cities arbitrarily dense and a lot of people, indeed more, wouldn't want to live in them if they weren't making a commuting tradeoff because of work.
My main point was that arguing for remote work/sprawl was not a ecologically-friendly argument. Sure, lots of people want to live in the middle of nowhere. But the negative externalities, looking to the future, are many, and they are something to consider when trying to praise WFH as a potential solution for anything.
Yes, everyone that reads this forum supports WFH because they benefit directly from it. From a birds-eye view though, looking at urban development and the cultural decline of isolated populations in the US, it looks like it could be a disaster.
You can make the inside of your box as amazing as you can imagine and some (not small) segment of people will opt to live where the sun can shine into their yard.
This is of course much less true in industries like finance.
Or Fitzrovia
Nevermind the fact that only a fraction of all jobs can be meaningfully done remotely, and a majority of employees wouldn't take the option if it was offered anyway.
You can argue that remote work drives demand for larger spaces, but again this comes down to the housing shortage. There's no reason that more 2 and 3 bedroom apartments couldn't be built if taller buildings were actually allowed to be built in the cities where demand for housing is high.
The issue is that we have allowed our built environment to become too centralized. In that sense the Boom Cities ARE the problem. Instead of one strip mall a dozen corner stores on an old school, "It's a wonderful life" small town main streets we have Times Square, and a bunch of overbuilt "new urbanist" attempts to mimic the magic that took 200 years to build.
Leon Krier has made this point visually here. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUX70P7UYAEchHS.jpg:large