I feel that one of the major points of tension is that many of the benefits of RTO are contingent on having virtually (no pun intended…) everyone in the same pl

I feel that one of the major points of tension is that many of the benefits of RTO are contingent on having virtually (no pun intended…) everyone in the same place to, e.g., foster serendipitous collaboration. If 30-80% of those that you work with aren’t in the same office on a given day, for various hybrid reasons, so many of the frictions of all-remote remain: meetings still need to be zoom, you probably won’t have enough team members for an impromptu working session, encounters in the hall or cafeteria are rare… This still comes with all the downsides of both the office (high costs, meeting room conflicts, commute) and all the downsides of the fully remote workforce that you mention, and some new ones, like people sorting into office people and remote people, which has implications for visibility and influence. So, the options seem to be “require nearly full-time office work” or “accept that the office is merely a coworking and offsite location”, but the latter still brings all the costs. This leads us to the trend toward greater and greater RTO, with no desire for control required, though I agree with the author that this seems to be a component in practice.