To be fair, the majority of office work is: drive to work, clock in, sit at your desk, field emails all day, work in Xcel/PowerPoint/etc, take meetings on zoom or whatever, whatever feeding yourself for lunch entails, returning to the office for more of the same, and then fighting traffic to get home. None of that requires an office. Just a laptop and reliable internet connection.

It’s a combination of companies trying to justify keeping a building, managers needing to make themselves seem needed when work from home has shown they really aren’t, the government trying to pump money back into fuel/restaurant/parking, ramp up collection of traffic/parking fines that they can’t if people aren’t driving as much, propping up their commercial property income that they are losing when businesses figure out that WFH is more efficient/less costly, and in some cases it’s just a case of narcissists in high positions needing to exert their “power”.