If you want to have people go to the office you need to pay them for the time to commute to that office. There is negative value to requiring people be in the office, especially given all these companies have opted for open plan BS - every study ever performed has found open and “shared” office plans reduce productivity, reduce collaboration, reduce morale, and increase disease.

The value businesses get from putting employees in the same room is making it harder to go elsewhere (creating a fake “family”), and managers get to feel like they have control and ownership of their plebs.

There are also people who use office life as surrogate social lives, and they seem to be the employees they were most in favour of mandatory RTO - “I can’t deal with not having a forcefully created social environment, so I’m going to demand that everyone come back”