Asking salaried employees to spend three days in the office isn’t exploitative, and it’s certainly not equivalent to mass layoffs or termination without cause.
Your health care example has little weight unless you are in a one employer town as you can always find other employers if you don't like one as much as that process isn't great.
Only situations where people have literally zero alternatives? Only situations where other employment alternatives meet your personal subjective threshold of "worse"?
Sure, you want me to go back on two years of financial gains? Pay me the difference I've gained in that time and I might give it some thought.
As a sibling comment said - changing the terms of employment unilaterally is exploitative - I'm just providing some color to the same sentiment.
Making choices based on the best information you have, because your employer provided it to you, and then having your life unilaterally uprooted by that same employer seems like a bad thing. It also seems like something that an employer should probably explain / justify with a business reason other than "vibes" and "everyone else is doing it." If the employer doesn't do the bare minimum to even explain the decision to the employee, people are gonna use words like "exploitative behavior" and "kinda fucked up" and I'm going to agree with them.
On the other hand, during the pandemic, companies (somewhat understandably) made a lot of fairly vague and open-ended statements about future plans and a lot of employees read those statements in accordance with what they wanted to be the case even if it was far from set in stone.