There is a lot of snark here. My non-cynical take is that they are aping the practices of top AI labs. OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and many other AI startup darlings have a culture of in-office work. People in non-hub offices are encouraged to travel a lot.

Yes, it will take a lot more than RTO to create an innovative culture like paying more for one, but one can reasonably hypothesize that working physically together is a necessary but not sufficient condition.