There's a number of kind of obvious reasons for that belief. Firstly the people who are mandating RTO want to think of themselves as high performers. They wan

There's a number of kind of obvious reasons for that belief. Firstly the people who are mandating RTO want to think of themselves as high performers. They want RTO so "high performers want RTO" is obvious to them. Secondly a lot of non-doing managers want to be able to justify their existance. To do that they need people in the office to distract by walking around and having conversations etc. They can't do this when people are just WFH doing deep work. Thirdly, if they know a manager wants RTO, then people who want to suck up to that manager will say they want RTO and will come in to the office to actively suck up to the manager. The manager will see these sycophants as high performers because they are spending their time fluffing the ego of the aformentioned manager.