What is the intention?

To look and feel important. I worked for a company that moved to a building simply because the CEO wanted the sign to be seen from a major highway. My 20min commute would become 1 hour or more. I left upon hearing that rationale.

Lol. The intention was to build the suburbs far away from the offices, not the other way around.

Exactly: the problem isn't the corporate employers, it's the middle-class Americans who bought into the suburban dream. Now that they got away from the black people downtown, they're complaining about the commute.

It's this, 100%, but I asked anyway just to see the thought process

That I think gets more to the point that our housing economy is completely irrational.

Used to be, you could live close but maybe not the best neighborhood.

Now everything that's not some new exurb 1hr+ away from medium-large metros is insanely priced.

I think it's more that residential areas are 1hr+ commutes from offices/downtowns. You could build an office next to a residential area, and some do, but many of the job applicants will be in a different residential area -- often even in a different city. Suburban sprawl, y'all.

You could have smaller offices in different neighborhoods, but there's usually not enough people in any given suburban area to justify an office. Co-working spaces are one compromise but larger companies dislike them for security/secrecy reasons.

I would also add that many people have reasons for not moving closer to work even if they could. Also people are no longer working for decades at the same job, and moving is a hassle if you're changing jobs every few years.

It's not "intentional", at least on the part of the company. It's intentional in that this is the product of American car culture and suburbia, and it's something that Americans have been buying into willingly for many decades now. The company can't just locate down the street from your house: that's zoned for residential use only. They can't locate at the shopping center near your subdivision: that's zoned for commercial use only (for storefronts/shopping, not corporate offices). And even if they did, that wouldn't help: it would be a nice short commute for you, but not for the other employees that all live in other subdivision scattered at a similar radius from the city center. The employees that live on the other side of town will have a horrible commute. What you're complaining about is simply what you get by building with such low density and making everything dependent on cars.