Most big tech companies are public. Record earnings and stock prices throughout the pandemic prove more than just not crashing and burning.
B) Engineering work is pretty inherently long-term in its impact I think, especially at big public companies. Most such companies I think have "revenue engines" that'll continue to operate on their for a bit even without much engineering input
C) I suspect the negative aspects to remote, if they exist (I think they do, but :shrug:) are also going to be most visible in the long-run. Relationships between people and teams start to deteriorate, new hires don't feel as integrated, etc. I think these kinds of things take a while to slowly build up in an org before they start to have significant effects
The best solution I've found so far is to provide both as options, do meetings in a remote friendly way, and then have in person meetings for everyone a few times a year.
Wage earners have a couple percent more dollars every year, but the rich have massively more dollars. This is basically clathrate-gun inflation, insofar as while it's true that the rich don't compete for, say, food staples and therefore the illicitly printed money is often considered "harmless"... it goes into investment, which is a different market, we are told... the rich can and given the right circumstances will compete for other things people need, such as housing (see: Blackrock's invasion of residential real estate).
If you look at the S&P denoted in, say, houses... which I've chosen because housing is most people's biggest expense, it's actually been a mediocre market, the past 20 years.
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[1] There won't actually be "back to normal". Just as 9/11 World didn't really end but blended into GFC World, which blended into Covid World... this one's going to blend into either European War World (if the current situation gets worse) or Climate Change World. The upper class will always need a crisis to hold over our heads (and, of course, several of these represent real crises that the upper classes did not intentionally create) to keep power.
Most of the big tech companies could have laid off 90% of their workers over the past 2 years and would have had even higher record earnings (and maybe stock prices).
What the big tech companies are concerned about is their continued ability to be productive and stay on top, and the fact that everyone had to move a ton of spending to online over the lockdowns doesn't mean that record profits during that time are sustainable.
There are pros and cons to remote work, and I wish more people were honest about the cons. I think a lot of people hand-wave it away because they like the idea of living where they want.