Having less costs is not clear to me. Might be assuming commute with a car (very US-centric). Paying for all the coffee, snacks, lunch, proper office setup might not always be expensed by the employer and incur extra costs. But let's say, on average, it is true that now employees have less costs because of working remotely.

Lower costs could have other consequences, other than people working less: general inflation; inflating rents/property prices; lower salaries for the same job; longer working hours (officially or not)

I think what you mention is one possible effect, but there are many and it is not clear which one dominates.

> so some people can now just choose to work less

that's good - they're able to recover some of their time. Just because this "own time" doesn't count towards official GDP, doesn't mean it isn't an improvement.

Working less is the purpose of the economy.

This is a scorching-hot take. Would you care to elaborate?

That's easy. We work to get stuff. The better the economy, the more stuff we get for less work input. The ideal that we're slowly getting asymptotically closer to is a world where we get everything for no work at all.

Couldn't have put it better myself. Of course with the caveat that "work" in this context means the labour we have to do to support our way of life, not the work we do for pleasure. These do and should intersect (as much as possible).

This is a backwards view. The economy and financial systems actively and VERY STRONGLY encourage us to spend as much time as possible making money.

This can be shown in absolute clarity: we are paid to work and not paid to not work.

You are forced to work, because you have expenses that you must pay: food, shelter, healthcare. If you do not work, you die.

You buy stuff to try to maximise your enjoyment in each unit of time, or to maximise your time: dishwashers to do the dishes, air fryers to cook food quicker. An apartment closer to work. A nanny, a cleaner, an accountant.

Some people use that extra time to... do more work. And because they do, the economy rewards them; inflation and expenses rise, and now everyone else needs to spend more time working too.

The exception to this is that it's possible to hit a threshold where your projected wealth is greater than your projected expenses for the rest of your life, and this allows you to work less. This threshold is unreachable for the vast majority of people in the world, and even the US, at least until the few last years of their lifes.