I've made many lifelong friends from the workplace, but most of those were not made through the course of day-to-day work, but through hanging out after work. Sure, being at an office during the day facilitates that (easy to gather a group of people at the end of the workday to go out for a drink), but that's by no means the only way of doing it.

Personally I find the negatives to required office work far worse than the positive of social opportunities in the office. Maybe I'm too biased to have an objective opinion on this (I'm in my early 40s and already made my office friends after years of being required to be in an office), but I would much rather have the flexibility of remote work, which still allows me to meet up with co-workers after work if we choose to do so. I absolutely agree that there's much more friction and inertia that would make those sort of meetups less frequent. But for me, that's a worthwhile trade-off.

I think businesses that are embracing remote work should still maintain a (smaller) office where employees can come in when they want to or need to, for whatever reason. Sure, this doesn't work when people are geographically distributed all over the place. But that can also be a choice when looking for a job: just as I might look for an employer that's remote-first, others can look for employers with office cultures.