"All that said, the open office approach itself is a cheap cheat / proxy for an open minded collaborative organization. It's popular because it worked at successful companies. The problem is, for those conpanies it was more a correlation than a cause."

Exactly. Collaboration is a mindset, not an office layout. Same happened with Agile. Let's just pick some random artifacts from Scrum and think we are Agile instead of actually being agile.