I wonder whether WFH will make work more ‘marginal value-add’ - it’s probably far easier to hire/fire someone remote than an office setting, for instance. Maybe some work will start to resemble Uber more than traditional work?

If I understand what you mean I totally agree; remote work isn't good for say developers who mostly got by by being good politicians. We probably all worked with people like that. You will be judged more by your actual output than by how well you give presentations or get along with bosses. On the other hand it's terrific for people who got pushed out of the job market due to ageism or other biases. It matters less who you are now, and matters more how well u actually get the job done.

In theory, I think this is a plausible positive scenario. In practice, however, I've never seen it play out like this (huge anecdata here).

I've worked remote most of my career, and in my experience, the politics and work theaterisms are still there, just different.

For example, someone's perceived level of "effort" often becomes a function of how responsive they are. Do they respond to Slack messages at random hours, when team members in different time zones/aggressive managers ping them? Do they frequently communicate with the team via video calls and Slack discussions? Just like in normal office politics, their actual productivity or work quality is assessed less than their appearance of engagement.

That's just an example, but my experience in general has been that remote doesn't change anything about the cultural of management at a company. Whatever metrics mattered in person, there will be remote equivalents to replace them.

The positive here is that good leadership is still good leadership, remote or not. The negative, obviously, is that remote isn't the balm for poor leadership that many hope it will be.

Being judged by what kind of output? At my current employer it matters very much that you get stuff done. It matters to a much lesser degree whether what you got done is actually (as opposed to being perceived to be) useful or impactful.

I agree but thats a different problem.

Yup. You mean UpWork, or companies like it.

The sunk cost is meaningful for a company randomly choosing to switch to work-from-home. However, currently Covid restrictions in various countries have pushed companies to work from home long enough that the leases are running out and they can reduce (or already have reduced) office space without losing any sunk cost.