It's not one brain making any decision here. There is strong consensus in our organization that remote workers are extremely difficult to manage relative to in-office employees. "Not best performance" is amazing if you are getting anything at all.

You're absolutely right that it's about power/control/domination. For better or worse, you have to force many humans into an office context before any productivity is possible. I know we like to believe every human is capable of completely unfettered WFH in the tech industry, but the world simply doesn't work this way.

Welcome back to my first point. It's hard to find people to replace this person who won't wind up in the exact same scenario. The trustworthy remote workers are in the minority. Until we all accept this it's going to be a really rough ride.

Perhaps the wide spectrum of takes on this boils down to the complexity of the underlying business. If you are running the equivalent of a B2B McD restaurant, I can understand how the bottom-barrel WFH employee & management techniques are viable.

Pre-covid WFH employees were hired among a backdrop of "most people still work in an office", so there were a lot of extra special precautions taken throughout. Those hiring remote employees wanted to hire remote employees. They weren't forced to.

Taken together, you now have a marketplace of workers where you get a radically different outcome depending on their "initial conditions".

This is a general statement about the economy that is plausibly true, but doesn't apply to all companies because different companies have access to different parts of the labor pool depending on pay, industry, and working conditions.

The kind of talent available to Facebook is very different from what's available to a mid-size insurance agency in Nebraska. I know for a fact that some of those companies in drawing from the low end of the talent pool saw their productivity fall into the dumpster during the mandated WFH period.