I think the major difference here is that there are 2 flavors of WFH employee: Pre and post covid. Covid-era WFH was conducted with reckless abandon (out of necessity). Anyone and everyone was 100% qualified to work remotely because that was the only possible way.

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".

That still does not address my point. Regardless initial conditions, during Covid, productivity was not impacted. So the “unqualified” remote workers still did fine. The question is what has changed since Covid, and what has changed is the clarity of employers direction with regards to working arrangements. That domination will come at a cost when it is measured by physical presence rather than delivery. In a sense it is also easier to just show up and do less. Let alone the confusion out of the fact that remote enabled geographic spread which now means that you start getting wrong way risk on enforcement and assertion of dominance. My argument is that in reality the world works in more mysterious ways than at face value.

> productivity was not impacted

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.