I work from an airport or airport cafe on occasion, but the ergonomics and noise don't make it a comfortable experience for long. And of course you are working on a small laptop screen.
To be properly productive, I need a quiet space, a desk at the proper height, a comfortable chair, and ideally 2 good-sized monitors.
Then imagine that your employer would offer you to compensate the coworking space's cost. And maybe the corporate Slack channel would start coordinating colleagues to go to the same cafe / coworking space to improve communication. Etc.
And all this stuff would do nothing to limit one's exposure to viruses and other pathogens; if anything, it would make the situation worse, by mixing people even more.
Work from home (or its equivalent, like a long-term remote resort in a cheaper country) makes sense.
Work from a well-situated, well-stoked office makes sense.
Work form "anywhere" makes way, way less sense; one must be hard-pressed by circumstances to choose it.
I like your analytical approach and you are right: why go to a coworking space when there's not much difference to a real office anyway?
I think the answer for me lies in the flexibility: In a coworking space I can come in or leave at whatever time I want. When I have an unproductive day I can go home at noon and when I feel like working on Saturday I will do so. Offices just have this peer pressure for Mo-Fr 9-6 that you can't evade and coworkers or your manager will raise their brows if you deviate from it. Even in coworking spaces I actually work a very regular schedule, but I just dislike not having the possibility to break out of it.
Nobody cares where you physically are, as long as you do your work and are available for communication. But people do care very much whether you're available for questions / quick to react if something happens, and can produce something by an agreed-upon date.
That is, stopping my work at noon because I can't persuade myself to work would be frowned upon, whether I were in the office or WFH, unless I'd say that I'm not feeling well. (Which is probably a good way to frame it.)
Likely I'm just quite privileged by now; this is the norm around me now, and was the norm for maybe 10 years, but definitely won't be the norm 20 years ago, when I was not a senior enough engineer yet.
If you have an iPad and MacBook that support it, I highly recommend it. I used it in a library while traveling, and it was a serious improvement in productivity.
I really need a home base with reliable internet and a comfortable spot to work. I have never been able to find this at all on the road, and certainly not consistently.
My company gives out 12” little cute Thinkpads to those who want a Windows machine. Those machines without a dock are really good just for checking emails in the airport.
laptop size depends on what kind of work you do. for a support dev or sysadmin, constantly on the move (visiting clients, etc) a small laptop is more productive than lugging around a large heavy piece of equipment.
Last year's equivalent moved to 13" screens, hence X390 (Intel) and X395 (AMD).
The second digit usually corresponds to the first digit of the Intel Processor model no, though I think there's been some exceptions over the last few years (certainly with the T series anyway).
I work for a company with a few offices, none is less than 500 miles aways from where I live.
I will likely never go back to those office.
But I could not picture myself working "on the road". I did it, it's stressful and leads to less productivity on my side.
Have you try an intense and involve pair programing session from a 'normal' coffee shop? It's frustrating. Noises, and lack of secondary monitors make it so.
Pretty often, I would have a week or two where I work from somewhere else, but I secure the place in advance , the network connection, and try to work it out with my co-workers if it's imply separate timezone. ( yay for daily stand up at 4AM ! )
I did work from a van from a few weeks. I was actually not working, mostly reacting. ( taking meeting, working on tickets as they are assigned to me... but never taking a deep breath and looking at how makes things better on the long run. )
Edit : my english is broken