Fair point. If the decision was actually about broad productivity, and management was able to make a clear-eyed judgment about that, you'd hope they would reveal the data they used, so people didn't just assume it was a petty control issue. I think a lot of people would assume that's what it was actually about.

Some ammunition for the opposition: this HBR article indicates that companies who managed the transition to remote work the best increased their productivity during the pandemic. So, a question I'd want to ask if my hypothetical boss said "back to the office everybody!" would be why we hadn't been able to adapt as well as the best of our competitors, and why we didn't want to learn from them and get that productivity boost.

https://hbr.org/2020/12/the-pandemic-is-widening-a-corporate...