I often wonder if this scenario is more common that not... if you look across decades, it's not clear to me that thriving downtowns in large cities is actually

I often wonder if this scenario is more common that not... if you look across decades, it's not clear to me that thriving downtowns in large cities is actually the norm. For example, I think about how many cities I was in as a traveling consultant between approx 2006-2015 with plenty of available (and likely overpriced...) class A space and empty suburban office parks that were there as a tax scheme. I moved to small town American in 2010 because it was clear that remote work would take off eventually... even if Covid hadn't come along, wouldn't there have jus been a more gradual decline of these downtown office spaces as more companies figured out they didn't need the overhead?