Completely unnecessary if they’re not maintaining some kind of physical infrastructure in those offices.

Reading “How Google Works” which came out before the pandemic and it emphasizes the true reason for radical innovation in early days of Google was putting truly intelligent people together in a closed space. Is there an example of a fully remote company doing generationally transformative innovation in the past few years? And no, VPN and git companies don’t count IMO.

My take is for “regular” tech work remote is perfectly fine but if you’re trying to do something magical it’s not.

Perhaps, but those sort of case studies don't really establish causality and tend to reflect confirmation biases from the authors and interview subjects rather than providing really rigorous evidence. There were plenty of other startups which also put truly intelligent people together in a closed space yet still failed to deliver radical innovation. Was the office space really the key factor in Google's success or just an irrelevant detail?

Remote work became mainstream only 3 years ago. It's early for this kind of considerations. Let's see in 5 years how many remote first unicorn there are going to be.