I was going to post the same thing. At the organization I worked at, so much got decided and invented in informal settings, and so much design done in (productive!) meetings around a whiteboard or smaller prototyping in a shared space.
Everyone continued to work _really, really, well_ together online during Covid quarantine - and we successfully onboarded incredible new hires. But something was missing. Individuals were productive, but collective decision making took longer in so many small hard-to-measure ways. Arguments took a little bit longer to resolve.
I have no measurements on any of this. You’d have to measure full product lifecycle for hundreds of products to get it. Even ‘how long does a design take’ or ‘how long do arguments take to resolve’ would need to be measured for years to get anything objective. Conversely, I’ll admit, the answer to ‘do people get more individual work done more efficiently at home’ was probably ‘yes’ - although collecting data for that would also be basically impossible over a time frame lower than years.
I _feel_ like work at home hurt the overall organization in ways that _really mattered_ - innovation, maintainability, shared knowledge - even just in ‘soft’ relationships (Does your manager know that other manager well? Does the one individual engineer have a (or any!) relationship with that other engineer working in a similar, but on-the-org-chart-disconnected system? Do your engineers get along with your designers?).
To debunk it would take literal decades to see how the organization was really affected. And even then, economic trends, market competition, even just quality of product _ideas_ - all the stuff that can affect the success or failure of a company or product - would make it really hard to tell how much work-from-home affected things.
So all I think it’s _possible_ to go on is ‘feelings’. And it sure felt to me that when we were all WFH something was ‘missing’. Novel innovation was a little ‘less’. I didn’t get to know designers or people in HR like I used to. That new hire, though they were doing _great_ remotely, was _so happy_ to finally meet people for real after a year, and the team so pleased to meet them. I think they were slightly more productive, and the team trusted them better, after they finally worked ‘in person’ together.
Maybe I’m just not ‘feeling’ the productivity gains from WFH because of my own bias, and maybe they are so large that they’d overwhelm the added ‘informal collaboration and personal relationships’ friction, but I don’t think so. I think the company would just slowly, over a timeframe of years - decades perhaps - get less ‘innovative’ and slower to react in a way that, from the outside, would just look like a company ever-so-slowly losing it’s edge.
I guess the proof of all of this will just have to come from future results. In twenty years, do the most successful, innovative tech companies tend to be the ones that work remote, or the ones with in-person offices? But I know the answer I’d bet on.