Imagine you work with a bad and slow laptop and your employer provides you with a new one, 1000x more powerful but the keyboard layout is different, it's dvorak.
You can then replace the keyboard with a layout you know or adapt the way you work by learning dvorak and to touch type.
What would you do if your productivity is at stakes and you could lose your job if your output slows down?
Transpose this to managers who "know" how to manage in a physical space and with small talk and now have to adapt to remote management. They usually don't have any strong metric to measure productivity outside of seeing you work with their eyes, knowing what exactly you're working on and you being there whenever they need you.
They usually see their own productivity as THE indicator of productivity for their team.
Is it now better for THEM to bring back the old "org layout" or to learn the new one and admit they don't know how to measure productivity ?
For all the managers I've seen, they have no problem with fast evolving task they can delegate, but they are reluctant on anything that forces them to evolve, they want to evolve their own way. Like many of us.
I instead see this as part of an industry-wide pushback against rising compensation and power among engineers.
For smaller companies: "big companies do it, there must be a good reason, let's do it too!".