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The companies mandating RTO seem to be in the few thousand employees and up range. My experience is that at those sizes a developer spends most of their time figuring out what and how to code, which is mostly done in meetings. Writing code in such a setup is a relatively small part of the work. Developer effectiveness doesn't have that large of an impact on their success, whereas organizational skills and leadership do.

Because developer productivity doesn't matter that much to big companies regardless of what they say. Their margins are high, and it's why google can have an entire team making sure their AI can't generate images of white people and still rake in more cash than god from their search monopoly.

Markets don't work rationally and the demand for RTO isn't from developers.

Also, non-IT stuff can also keep office rental businesses up and running.

Because a lot of tech companies are monopolies and do not have to compete. They can do what they want.