I'm one of them. I'm pretty terrified that the gears of capitalism will eventually lead to remote work being outlawed.
1) Employers who allow remote work will have lower office costs
2) Employers who allow remote will be able to poach employees from competitors who do not offer remote work
These are both strong incentives for employers to allow remote work. Obviously not all do, but over time employers who allow remote work will outperform their peers due to the two reasons above, which can help encourage other employers to allow it in order to stay competitive.
(Interestingly Charles Schwab is a notable counterexample -- they were forcing people back into office, until the company's finance is in a bad shape, and they rushed to halt that and actually closed down many offices.)
Sure, there are some big sprawling HQs of the gigacorps who just can’t find enough space to rent otherwise, but that seems to be a minority of office employment to me?
3) Employers who are fully remote (as opposed to even 1 day per month in office) can hire in different locations. For many roles, you can find great employees in places like Eastern Europe for far cheaper than in Silicon Valley, for example.
Just look at Google.
A majority of the leads I get from recruiters about dev work are from companies who now have hybrid or full on-site requirements. It's being outlawed like you say, but there is a push from certain companies to be back in the office.
The last three contacts I've gotten from recruiters always ask me if I'm ok being in the office three days a week on job req's they've contacted me about. So take solace in the fact more people are opting out of these kinds of jobs and recruiters are telling me the more companies require in office or hybrid, the smaller the pool of worthy candidates - regardless of whether they're disabled or now.
There is push to get people to go back into the office, but at this point, I'm not seeing a real willingness for people to jump at those jobs right now.
Unlikely. The current "RTO" push is simply executive management not wanting to take the write-down hit on all that unused office space that is a loss now that no one is working inside of it. Once they've either jettisoned the space, or taken the write-down anyway (because they were forced into this) you'll find all these RTO calls dying down.
For Capitalism, as in the system wherein the means of production are privately owned, it might be a toss-up. A person who works from home isn’t going around the world providing as much value to the landlord class.
Disabled people have been begging for years to have more flexible working arrangements, and have been constantly told "sorry it's impossible." But then covid shows up only for everyone to discover it's been possible the whole time.
You have to distinguish not physically being in the office from "working from home." A LOT of jobs (e.g. many sales job, on-site consultants, even my oil delivery guy) didn't involve being physically in the office much but weren't WFH.