I'm going to add a dimension I don't see often to this.<p>College grad/New Hires are super difficult to onboard remotely. It's already difficult to go from school to a tech job, but add in that you now don't have any sense of what's going on and it's easy to get forgotten even with a good/active mentor.<p>Also lots of young people don't want to stay in their hometown and move to Seattle/SV/SF, and without the office it's very easy to literally have no friends. When I got a job and moved out to the west coast I had to very actively find people to meet up with, I know a bunch of coworkers who didn't and either ended up leaving frequently to go back just to combat mental health issues, or just sitting home alone. Not saying that ALL of your friends need to come from work or whatever, but if you're new to a city and single it's much easier to seed those friendships.<p>Lots of people don't buy the innovation, "talk about x by the watercooler", argument, but I think on a macro scale it's a bigger deal. How many startups are started because two people became friends in SV, lived together and started a new project. That only happens with talent density that you get from tons of smart people being colocated. (And it's something lots of ambitious young people move out to the west coast to get, where I came from most of the best jobs were trade schools, construction and trucking lol, not too many promising startups come from a small town in the middle of nowhere just because there's noone to work with.)<p>So there's def some demand from young people to go into the office which puts a pro in the return to office column for the pointy hairs. Not saying that specific policies are good or bad, just want to outline a datapoint.