It is my very strong belief that the people who tend to rise to the level of management also tend to prefer in-person work for a variety of reasons. But once you are at the *executive* level, what you see is that their meetings are physically distributed to the point where WFH actually makes more sense for them than being in an office; they are bouncing from meetings with clients in LA then meetings at the development center in Chennai to a client in London and then back home for a few days. But notice what those executives are doing: they are constantly on planes to go meet in-person because they believe that this is a valuable activity. I have yet to meet (or be) the executive that feels that the frequent flier miles, hotel points, and predictably really good steak for dinner on the expense account justifies being away from home, the constantly traveling, etc. They do this because they see it as valuable.
So if the execs are willing to put themselves through the grinder to do things in-person, it's easy to see how they feel that:
1. In-person is better.
2. In comparison to their days of 6 - 12 hours of air travel, hotels, irregular sleep, eating, etc. schedules, showing up to an office every day for a 9 - 5 is a breeze.
Where they BADLY miscalculated, is they haven't realized that it's so expensive and so difficult to live within any reasonable commute to an office now, unless you are very well paid and don't have kids. Have kids? Either your kids are going to a terrible school or you are paying for private school or you are living 45 - 90 minutes away from a downtown. Mass transit options are weak in most areas and buses get stuck in traffic and don't reduce the length of the commute, they just let you skip the part where you drive, in exchange for being stuck on a bus. 20 years ago when I was taking the train into Manhattan from NJ daily, it was so packed that I was often having to stand on the platform between cars in the winter time, and I am sure it has only gotten worse since then.
Etc.
If offices were in some magic area where there was little traffic or amazing mass transit, great schools, low cost of living, and the area was filled with social and entertainment options, so people could all live 15 - 30 minutes away and love their life, and couple this with PTO systems that let people take of their kids when they were sick or on school break, or go to doctor's appointments in the middle of the day, and otherwise do the stuff that they sneak out of EFH to do, I am sure that RTO would be not too big of a deal for most folks.
J.Ja
