at scale, all endevours between people invite this kind of risk. Shops routinely have to deal with 1-5% lossage of stock for reasons that might be customers or staff, or both. Some employers wind up doing a-social things like videoing staff and intrusive body searches (Amazon, South African gold mines) and others reward their staff so the motivation to petty fraud is less than the benefits of being well paid.
You write as if this "elephant" is "it" for all time, for all remote workers. It's not, because there has been (and will continue to be) a cohort of remote workers from before Covid, who realise there is a cost/benefit here, and who do not commit fraud, they just work from home at the intensity they work and their employer is just fine with that
Sure, sending everyone home, and then wanting them to come back highlighted that people who aren't self selected up front to WFH include a cohort who cheat. So what? They probably cheat in other ways at their desk.
SOME remote work works worse and worse over time because SOME people realise they can scam their employers. But, what % it is, against overall work-life rebalancing, value for money, increased work time because of not spending time commuting, reduction in other costs (ok, dealing with sunk cost in the office is an issue) .. It's nothing like as elephant-in-the-room as you think it is.
No, one of the elephants in the room is that a fucktonne of Management KPI are built around offices, and the people who demand return to office want to return to achieving those KPI. And, a fucktonne of corporate future profit and tax offset is predicated on property retaining its value and those office blocks are dropping like stones in a deep pond: Thats why Google and Salesforce both unloaded huge property investments (rental or lease) recently.
Managers and CEOs and Boards want return to office because they have "REI-ified" beliefs around the nature of work and the value of office work, and they have set deliverables which will make them personally wealthy by achieving this.
Its not dissimmilar to the mass firings: there was no across the board need to shed 10% of staff. It was a KPI which benefited a cohort of managers and CEOs. Thats all (in my opinion)
Workers and Bosses are always in tension. The factory model was designed to increase production at the expense of craft work done in the home by weavers and spinners. Was the "product" better? For some things yes, but for others no: it was about profit extraction, Taylorism, and hourly rates.