This has nothing to do with my situation; I'm currently a full time student.
My observation is in general, not about any specific situation. Remote work has costs, and your leaders have decided those costs are better than the in-person costs. That's fine, and in a fully-remote environment it can work, but pretending like it's strictly "better" is unjustified.
We have NO IDEA how we’re going to maintain our current levels of energy usage even 100 years from now. We’ll run out of gas, run facefirst into global warming, and electrification with renewables will require a monumental amount of scarce resources and work.
We have a great solution to part of this problem. Move electrons, not people. Even if office culture really was all that and you’re right about everything, at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter because it’s unsustainable. We can’t move to solutions like electric self-driving cars fast enough, the electric co-worker MUST be part of the solution.
So I argue it doesn’t matter if remote is better. The costs of offices are increasing more and more and more and something had to give. It’s not if in office be remote work is better, the question is what benefits most form our limited abilities to work out of an office? Right now office culture is STILL running on borrowed time by having the commuters not pay for the externalities of their emissions. Of course on-site is important but that 5 day in the office culture was ALWAYS going to die.
Electrons can't yet sufficiently replicate the full experience of being in person for teams that still intend on having both, and what the electrons can't cover will be covered by someone, and that tends to be on someone who has no say about their newly added burden.
My observation is in general, not about any specific situation. Remote work has costs, and your leaders have decided those costs are better than the in-person costs. That's fine, and in a fully-remote environment it can work, but pretending like it's strictly "better" is unjustified.