How many of them have slowed down b/c of the pandemic vs WFH? I can imagine a job being a lot harder if suddenly your children are home all day, heck my kids aren't even school age and my wife is home fulltime and I still sometimes have my little ones come in asking for juice or to help them put on their shirt, or something like that.

Not to mention the additional stress and isolation that comes from all of the pandemic management measures, and the omnipresent low level fear. Honestly if WFH has even remained steady with in office in this hostile environment to me that is a pretty big indicator it is better for businesses.

this matches my experience as a dev manager. We had a bump in productivity initially, probably due to a fully-charged battery of team combined with less disruptions, but now productivity has declined by all our quantative measures (deploys, cycle times, failure frequency,etc). These are all proxies and not prefectly isolated, but better than "gut feel"

Exactly. I've lived both experiences: it was perfect for me when my son, few months old, was sleeping the most part of the day. But once a kid switches to 1 nap per day, it's impossible to have a schedule to have any kind of focused work. Day care here have long waiting lists and they've been closed for half of the pandemic anyway.

Wouldn't daycare present just as much of an issue if you started working from an office?

One parent works for money, one parent works to take care of the home/children is not an unusual situation.

Less so when the daycares are fully open again.