They still want to live and work in downtown cities. They still want to go to the office and mingle/network.
HN is an echo chamber.
I enjoy my colleagues and work environment (and wouldn't trade it for the world now that I'm mostly remote!), love to chat with them and keep in touch, but at the end of the day I already have my own friends with whom I have stronger bonds than the workplace, and I'd rather spend my free time with them rather than endless happy hours with work colleagues who are, in the grand scheme of things, really only present in my life for the duration of a job. Coincidentally, some of my favorite coworkers have this same outlook.
I concede this is all anecdotal, yes, but so is your generalization. I personally believe much of this youngest generation of professionals, of which I am part, already has relatively established social networks due to social media that someone even 10 years ago entering a new job in a new city would not have, hence the less need to rely on the workplace for a social life.
If you ask me, the future of the workplace isn't fully-remote or fully in-person, it's an office where everyone comes in 2-3 days a week, as necessary, and working remote or at-home the rest of the time.
I'm in the same boat as you, also early career but Please, NO. Being asked to go twice a week to the office is the worst trade-off. It means I still need to live in commuting distance of the office but I also need to rent an extra room to be my office where I'm expected to work for 3 days/week.
I favor a model in which once a quarter the whole team spends a week together as a "retreat". This gives you flexibility to really live where you want without that need to still go to the office. It also means the company doesn't even need to keep an office to start with.
EDIT: GitHub actually balances this beautifully, imo. They have offices in SF, NY, Austin, and Tokyo for those who want to go into an office every day or semi-regularly, though they also do a yearly company-wide retreat and quarterly team gatherings if you want to work fully remote.
The world is so social, I have large circles of friends/aquaintences from my hobbies, from university, and from back home. I have my apetite of kind of, but not too close, friends more than satisfied, and would rather have alone time or time with the most important people of my life.
Everyone is different, but before I could work from home I stopped going to lunch because I just needed that time alone as the rest of the day was full of people. I'm not bragging, because I'm not sure if this really is better than "just" having your work and your few work-pals in life than the endless social circles and the hundreds of people you are strangely intimate with through FB, IG, snap updates.
But it is what is and I hope I never have to go back to office life, in that case I have to cut out some social media, some friends and/or a hobby from my life to survive.
I think the vast majority want to go back once it is safe to do so.
But most young people are not going to pack up and move to a small rural town in the middle of nowhere.
Companies came to big cities because that is where young talent wanted to live. Not the other way around.
The caveat is of course I have to be working on something I'm interested in with good people. If work was full of bad people or I didn't care about the work then of course I wouldn't be excited to go to work.
A couple of other things though: I hate remote communication because it's so different to being in-person and I feel like WFH stifles your ability to communicate what you're working on with people outside of your team.
Daniel Turner did a great peace on why he left the DC metro area: https://humanevents.com/2020/07/23/goodbye-washington-dc/
Other than that I think it will be business as usual.
I like WFH a lot more than I like commuting and working in the office. As a youngster though I loved the cut and thrust of a metropolis. Especially the adventures after work.
I hope the current situation creates a permanent inflection in companies attitudes, which enables me to perhaps move out if this big city and find remote work for my last 10-15 years of work.