Looking at it from a sympathy-for-the-devil standpoint, WFH is a serious dilemma for management. The problem is that almost everybody has traditionally been OK with working in an office (necessarily so), and management as a class is tasked and structured accordingly.

As for the workers themselves, some people are OK either way, some people insist on WFH (raises hand), and some people absolutely can't deal with WFH. Maybe the latter people have stronger-than-usual social needs by the standards of stereotypical engineering workers, and genuinely contribute more as part of a physically-present team. Asking those folks to adapt to a solitary work life is like asking me to get up at 6 AM and hit the freeway every morning. It's not going to happen... at least, not for long.

Or maybe they live in a one-bedroom apartment with a spouse and child or three. It's easy for some of us hardcore WFH advocates to forget how privileged we are.

So now, management has to decide how to get the most out of all of these workers. I believe that those who put their foot down and demand RTO will eventually be outcompeted by those who don't, but that doesn't make the job of converting a previously office-oriented culture to hybrid or exclusive WFH an easy one. Middle management without appropriate IT support, for example, is going to fail at the WFH transition no matter what they do.

Now, throw ML into the mix, and it's easy to see that we are in for a tumultuous couple of decades. I keep recalling the words of Nikola Tesla at the dawn of electrification: Humanity will be like an anthill stirred up with a stick. The changes that are coming are bigger than any of us probably think.