It's actually pretty funny to me to see WFH was a trend. Corporations saw massive money saving opportunities and jumped at it. Now that cities are suffering from the lack of workers therefore lack of revenue streams to many local shops impacting tax revenue to the cities themselves, governments are letting each of these companies know to "BRING BACK THE WORKERS" before it all falls apart and the commercial real estate value is wiped out. Some companies have a vested interest in keeping the work office around anyway.
One particular recent article: https://www.techradar.com/news/dell-goes-back-on-wfh-pledge-forces-employees-to-come-back-to-the-office
Dell would clearly save a lot of money from getting rid of their corporate buildings which need to be leased, cleaned and maintained in every possible way.
Remember though, Dell sells office products. Why would they ever benefit from a work from home boom? Surely they have a big interest in keeping office culture booming so they can sell to offices. It wouldn't make much sense for them to keep a WFH policy and promote it past COVID policies. Fuel the office boom and offices have to continue to purchase and maintain products they have from companies none other than DELL.
All the other corporate speak of collaboration, synergy, social life is all bs. Sure you could make the argument that lower managers are also contributing to the degradation of work from home policies, but it depends on how one sees the usefulness of their manager. As a group, they exist as the chosen ones to report up the managerial chain, so I don't see how they have much vote in rescinding WFH policies. How many individuals want to report their progress up the chain? Honestly. How many direct reports would higher managers want to deal with? Not a lot.
People spend more time working due to work from home. You don't have to ask many people if they spend more time working with work form home. It's just easier to get into the work and focus. For some people, they have kids and animals to take care of so they may not see much benefit from work from home. It depends though, some just find a babysitter or animal sitter and get on with work.
WFH policies only work for corporate workers who can be higher paid than other workers. Construction, moving/transportation, restaurant workers don't benefit from work from home policies not unless human controlled/monitored robots exist to do the work which isn't reality for most companies.
Anyway, corporations are rescinding their policies mainly due to government more than internal pressure. That's what I think. Heck, I would laugh if it was a conspiracy to remove office benefits and have people return to office with less benefits. 👀