...fix the ego of BAD managers
I read some studies from a decade before COVID about remote work, and the upshot was that teams under previously under-performing managers indeed performed worse, but the previously higher-performing teams performed better.
Makes sense because bad managers manage to the signs of work, not work itself - it the but in the chair, not talking to someone else, etc., whereas the good managers manage to their targets and DGAF about the signs.
Send the poor manager's teams remote, and now they not only lack direction on real goals, but now they're also free of being hounded. Send the top managers' teams remote, and they have the same guidance, but less time and effort squandered commuting, less office interruptions, etc, and they improve.
Considering the studies and recent experience, I'd almost consider it a test of a manager's skill - if they cannot manage a remote team productively, they cannot manage a local one.
(Of course meanwhile, the right wing has gone fully into abusive leader attitude over any facts, and so squanders Congress' time with nonsense like this. Ugh)
But if I barely drive ever, and work entirely remote, is it so bad to live in a suburb? Genuinely wondering.
The problem is most US towns and suburbs are not set up to be core walkable, dense places, where you don’t even need a car to get home. There are exceptions (I can think of some Hudson Valley towns on train stations, where their core has mixed use multi-story attached housing), but that’s not the norm and is generally discouraged via zoning.
Although with package deliveries, the impact is amortized by all the packages so the impact is probably less than if I had driven to the store, this isn't true of grocery and food deliveries. Those are about as inefficient as would be if I did that driving myself.
The approach of thinking about suburbs/city/etc will all have to account for the new hybrid lifestyle of remote work now – where people are living in remote areas but still not driving that much either.
Less-dense housing strongly tends to be less-green than denser housing, commute or no commute. The differences are extreme enough that yeah, it's pretty close to being that cut and dry.
Your last point does have a pretty big caveat, in that widespread strict residential zoning outright prohibits almost every kind of useful support business from setting up shop close enough to where many people live (that is, in the suburbs).
The answer to this, of course, is "so let's get rid of that hopelessly strict zoning, which is bad for a host of other reasons, too", not "so remote work is still the problem".
Better for car pollution, better for urban house prices, better for the cost of gas, better for families/kids, and better for rural communities (as people move out of cities, and take their relatively high salaries/disposable income with them).
It does cause a short term shift as downtown support businesses (e.g. coffee shops, food, etc) have to move closer to where people live. But that is largely a return to what was normal 50 years ago anyway.