How do they know it's "remote" and not "working during a pandemic"?

Companies have been testing this for ages. It's the holy grail to have remote work on par with in office.

As someone who has done it for over a decade, in software, it's totally doable providing your org has all the infrastructure and has a culture that successful business requires treating their employees like humans who need to socialize, communicate, and slack off a bit like they would in a physical office. Usually online work turns into a push to maximizing efficiency and minimizing time you'd normally be "wasting" at an office. People then hate it, informal socialization doesn't happen, and hidden business processes that live in those informal social interactions that keep things moving don't happen.

They can happen online, the most difficult part of building trust with others to create positive cohesive relationships.

I think you'll be looking for a while if your standards for an employer is that you have arbitrary access to the data they use to make decisions. There are a handful of radically transparent employers out there but it is the vanishing exception, not the rule.

Well the trouble is if you tell everyone that you are data-driven, and do so in most cases, then people are definitely going to ask about what data you used to make a decision.

If you're explicitly HiPPO based decision making, this tends not to happen.