If you do valuable work and prefer remote then your employer ought to make an exception. That's how things were before COVID (default in the office; WFH negotiated on a person-by-person basis). It makes sense to get back to that.
In my long experience as a software developer its actually not this way at all in practice and is actually the inverse of your claim.
In practice I've seen that it is actually much easier for lower productivity employees to get by on vibes alone while they spend all day browsing reddit/social media/HN/etc when everyone is in office, whereas when you are remote your actual output tends to be much more openly documented.
Sure, when working from home you can go take a 1 hour nap in the middle of the day, which you can't do in the office, but such "shirking" as snapshots in time don't equate at all to actual sustained productivity (and in fact, being able to nap randomly during the day I've found is often a huge productivity boost if anything).
If someone actually works well remote and is responsive then they should be allowed to continue.
And in the cases where there is a delay I find that I still get the response quicker via slack than I would in person if I tried to find the person while they were at lunch in person and then had to go out of my way to try to find them again in the future, whereas the slack message allows for slightly async comms without me having to keep making requests which in my experience is more than adequate to get the job done.
Perhaps you need a lot of hand-holding day to day but everyone I work with does not.
The amount of times that I have had to go to the numerous different kitchen areas only to find out the employee left the building to get coffee or run an errand is just as high if not higher than someone being 'away' on Teams when I need them. Only at home I just set an alert for when they're back online instead of attempting a wild goose chase.
And then the next thing you'd want to demonstrate is that shirking your work duties more at home is actually, in practice and on net, damaging for overall company productivity. I mean, it's entirely possible that enough people both work less, and get more done in a more conducive environment. For example, by working in intense, focused bursts, then fucking off for an hour, then coming back to work hard again. As opposed to being forced to sit at a desk in a cubicle all day, surfing the web, hating your life, and doing as little work as possible even though you are physically proximate to your manager. That's a testable thing. We can find that out, but to my knowledge no companies who are mandating RTO have gone to the effort.
Instead, they're going with what seems obvious to them.
If you're wondering, this is why managers often suck. The ability to perform well in office politics and your performance/understanding are pretty much completely orthogonal. Slackers get promoted all the time, because they're likable and you're not.
In a WFH environment you can't do this, so more emphasis is on your actual work. You can't swindle people with a pretty face and confident timbre. Or, at least, not anywhere close to the same extent.
If an employee isn't performing what's asked of them to a satisfactory standard, discipline and/or fire them. If they're non-physical laborers getting things done on time who'd rather not work in an office, there is no reason to force them to work in an office.
While you may be able to do this, I'm not sure it's so easy to sustain it, or to replace the hiring model with a fully "hire into WFH" mode.
Running a company is a lot more than putting a time clock on the wall.
The cosmic justice for dealing with a life-time of hatred from those around you for being a tech-bro/nerd (see hatred of "coastal elites" from MAGA) is that since they don't actually know what you do or how to measure you, it's extremely easy to make a mountain out of a mole hill on any technical issue.
In literally every organization, tech job, or related I've been in, the amount of real hard work expected of you was almost inversely proportional to your compensation. Those paid the most were sitting in meetings all day, talking. No matter how much they cope and claim it's hard, it's easy compared to coding all day.
This is why we still maintain the idea of "he has management written all over him" to the people who actually see through it and speak truth to power about how dumb most of the make-work that's being done actually is.
The reality is that if you make it clear that you're willing to do a lot of grunt, annoying, stupid work because someone tells you to do it - they will naturally treat you worse for being gullible enough to uncritically do it. Those who buck the trend are treated well in American tech jobs. Why work hard when not working anywhere near your max gets you perceived as a wunderkid?