But I feel like COVID situation triggered stuff that either accelerated existing trends or introduced new problems, and I don't think there's going back.
People quoting productivity drops from new hires during COVID omit insane hiring in tech - implying that remote work is to blame and not their structure inability to scale to utilize those unprecedented numbers of new hires productively. Especially since most of the hiring was aimless "we need to grow headcount to capture the market growth". People getting paid serious money to literally sit around. That's going to cascade in other ways - I feel like entire industry standard of acceptable delivery sinked
Getting people back to the office sounds like a nice narrative because it's relatively easy to fix and corelate.
It's also, conveniently, entirely not the fault of upper management for insane over hiring and underutilization.