Question (I'm not being facetious; I actually wonder this) - Why do companies (and some workers) seem to believe that to have a great office culture people must be trapped there?

This is one of the sticking points in this discussion, I think.

(Leaving aside the issue of long commutes.) Why do people's actual hours sitting at the desk need to policed?

In my experience, policing desk hours doesn't do much for software engineering and most creative fields. Sometimes it is necessary though, if someone is checked out and lying about getting stuff done or being able to hit a milestone if they are just forced to sit and policed they will get stuff done but otherwise they will not. I find this latter case to be the exception. People with this attitude are already toxic when being policed, I think with WFH there's going to be a multiplier for their toxicity.

I think in a great office culture people are going to the office because they want to, or because they are more productive there. In my experience this is what will happen once a bunch of people are already at the office and remote people can't catch up or feel left behind on some stuff. Also on meetings when there's like four or five people on a room the people on videoconference just can't work at the same level and it's very hard to accommodate for them.

I think it's ok if some companies don't want to go back to the office, but I just think colocated teams perform better. I'd rather be on the teams that perform better. I think maybe for a giant like Google letting everyone go home is not a bad idea, but if you want a tiger team to skunkworks something up for you I think WFH won't cut it. Maybe a few days a week or every other week if you need to a lot of alone work, but not all the time.