Also I've heard many stories of people leveraging return to office policies for raises. If an important and productive team-member says "cover my increased cost

Also I've heard many stories of people leveraging return to office policies for raises. If an important and productive team-member says "cover my increased costs or I'm leaving" then most managers who have the discretion to pay that person more will. Managers don't want their good employees to quit. Maybe large corporations aren't taking that cost into account, but they probably should. Ultimately though, I suspect return-to-office policies are not driven by current financials at all. They're driven by the emotions of senior management. Probably a combination of feelings - concern that they can't see their employees, fear (whether founded or not) that remote work is less productive, fear that some employees are doing no work and getting away with it, desire to impress someone higher up the tree who cares about presenteeism - just the usual stuff that drives big corporate decision making.