In EU, even relatively good IT salaries are mediocre when you factor in monthly rental. A simple one-bed apartment can easily take 50% of your net income.
Having freedom to move, even within a particular country, allows reducing that 50% to something more sustainable.
Take for example Oxford. A typical rental will be around £1,600 pcm. The median pre-tax salary is around £50,000, which converts to around £3,100 net. So, the apartment is actually more than 50% of your net income. Some programming jobs will pay a bit more, but you get the idea.
Another example, in Barcelona, a median net salary is less than a median rental. IT will pay better, but expect to spend around 40% of your net salary. I could also bring up Stockholm or Copenhagen and, unless you are in very senior IT jobs, it's going to look very similar.
Obliviously, if you live in some small-ish 200k-500k non-touristic city away from the big metro areas, then CoL will be much less and your income will stretch much further and you might be better off financially, but then those cities also have a lot less to offer in terms culture, events, entertainment, along with fewer or even no work and socializing opportunities for SW devs as tech jobs concentrate only in the big metro areas.
So it depends on what you prioritize. Young single people tend to sacrifice savings, to live in big expensive cities for career and social opportunities, while people with families tend to do the opposite. But in general it's difficult to have your cake and eat it too unless you're very lucky.
Covid was an exception because it made "work from home" literal, as the isolation was the point.
Of course even in normal times, coworking spaces cost money and have to be available, so you might now have a situation where workers now have to pay extra to not be isolated. And not everyone can do or wants to do that.
This is reductive to the point of absurdity. Situational friends are still friends. How many of your elementary school friends are still your friends these days? High school? Summer camp? Heck college friends? Unless you're living in the same town with the same people, there's a good chance that most of them aren't anymore. Were these people also not your friends? When you leave that book club, when you stop showing up at the corner cafe, when you move out of the neighborhood, how many of those people will you still be spending time with 5 years later. For the ones that you aren't, were they also not really friends?
Friendship isn't a binary thing. Not every friend you make will help you bury a body, but not every friend or friendship needs to (or should) run that deep. And sure not everyone you're "friendly" with at work are friends, it's a spectrum. But situational friends are friends. People you bond with for a short while over a shared experience and then when life moves one or both of you on the friendship ends are still friends.
In my opinion I consider a friendship any relationship where no matter how long ago it ended or how long ago you last talked you wouldn't mind hearing from them again, even if it might only be awkward small talk. Old schoolmates, college roommates, military squadmates, and co-workers can all be friends. They can all be acquaintances too. But crucially the fact that you stopped talking at one point or stopped spending time together isn't the demarcating factor between the two.
It's been this way for years
> Work friends are not friends.
Some even married coworkers. New jobs but still married