I don't think remote working is in its infancy, it's more a case of the scope has been changed the recent year or so.
The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute. However remote work never brings the same connection to your co-workers as being physically present in an office and in my opinion that is extremely important.
I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city. Since that is at the cost of those living in the city with shorter commute, there will always be mixed feelings about working from home/remote working at the workplace.
> The benefits of remote work is mostly being able to focus and reducing the daily commute.
One of the reasons there's so much opposing views on WFH is that there are also other big benefits, that apply only to a subset of the population. Among those are, the ability to optimize your workspace for your own needs, and not having to have the "connection to your co-workers". For some of us[0], this can easily make 2-5x difference in terms of ability to focus and lowered stress.
The more universal, but less important and a bit controversial benefit of WFH in many occupations[1] is that you get to optimize your whole schedule - work and private - globally. E.g. you can take a break to run a personal errand in the middle of a work day, and then work a little longer, instead of desperately trying to batch up errands and take a day off in advance. This also reduces stress, and allows you to rescue even more free hours in your life, at no cost to productivity.
> I understand very well that those with long commutes like the work from home idea, most of the time it also enables them to have a nicer house/apartment than what would be available in the city.
Commute is a funny thing. Back in the day, my wife lived in a small town and worked in a different one, and her commute of 20km took less than my 4km commute in the big city, and that's using the tram system (which avoided most of the traffic jams).
The freedom to be anywhere is the important thing, though. It's not just about nice apartments, but also about being able to move closer to your partner's non-WFH workplace, or closer to extended family so your kids can see their grandparents more often, etc. I sometimes feel like an outlier here, but I'm planning to move back to a large city (different one than my employer is headquatered in, though!) - the costs of living will increase, but so will the access to benefits of modern civilization. Good cities are much more than work hubs.
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[0] - A subset of whom you could call "neurodiverse", but my current belief is that everyone's mind is different, and ones you'd call "neurotypical" are just good enough at hiding their peculiarities in the social context.
[1] - I.e. if your job does not require to actually be butt-in-seat for 8 hours a day, and your employer isn't of the abusive kind that decides to surveil you minute-by-minute anyway.
I believe it still is in its infancy. Cities and societies have not adapted for remote workers yet, at all. OTOH the office has a whole ecosystem of transportation, real estate, cafeterias, cleaning etc that is adapted to it.
Sure, being in the same space is a different kind of connection, the question is which part of that connection is needed for work. I 'd personally rather share a cowork space with my friends rather than whoever the company chooses for me, and i think that's going to be a trend in places that house lots of remote workers. There are in fact cities being redesigned around remote workers like Madeira. I think the actual problem that people complain about is not the lack of physical bodies at work, but the lack of physical bodies in general. That needs to change if people are going to work remote in large percentages, people will need to either find more friendly neighbors or just start talking to their neighbors , like people did a few decades ago.
And then we haven't even began to scratch the surface of ways to connect with coworkers. I find that sharing a gaming environment (like e.g. secondlife) gives a sense of presence, space, and connection and takes away that lingering anxiety of "where is everybody?" that I get when i work at home. Slack also does that to a small extent.
Ultimately, remote work is objectively giving people more options, and that is a measure of progress, so I see the transition as inevitable. I think people are being held back by the current designs of modern big cities, which have been entirely shaped around the home-work routine. In fact, large parts of the rewards of "real life" (e.g. making new friends) has been moved to the office for purely logistical reasons (other places of congregation stopped existing). This isn't inevitable, remote workers will develop new habits in a few years. Historically it's the cities that changed to adapt to work conditions, not the other way around , and now a critical mass of workers is ready for the change (In fact, the switch to remote was possible years earlier, COVID just accelerated it).
