Comment by ghaff

Yeah. What I've seen personally is that normalizing rarely coming into an office means that a lot of people essentially stop coming in even if maybe coming in half the time and doing off-sites actually makes a lot of sense. People just make coming into an office an exceptional event and if other people they know aren't there, why bother? Latterly, if I came into my nominal work location 30 minutes away, I would not know or work with a single person there.

And it may even be understandable to the degree that they end up moving a couple hours away so now it's a huge pain for them and their co-workers to get together. You don't need commercial real-estate conspiracy theories.