The latter means you are positing management incompetent enough that they do not understand that sunk costs should be ignored? I am not saying you are wrong, BTW.
Even worse, in many cases the costs are not entirely sunk. You might be able to get out of a lease with a penalty, if you own the buildings you can sell them. In either case its cheaper to keep a building unused than to run it as an office.
> you are positing management incompetent enough...
Those people are world-class politicians or born super-rich. When you put a selection filter that exclusive in a population, you force every other attribute extremely close to the median.
And the median of competence on any field is much smaller than the mean.
>if you own the buildings
This opens a new avenue I'd never considered: that some of the RTO pressure is perhaps due to keeping real estate prices up. Maybe there is somehow pressure from commercial landlords towards the tenants to keep the building occupied, or as you stated places that own the building don't want it to be devalued by appearing (or actually being) abandoned for years.
In fact I used the key phrase "sunk cost" directly to imply that, since that's entered the lexicon as a common reasoning error
While business leaders want to think of and portray themselves as these hyper-rational actors whose every choice is either made from ingenuity or total necessity, this is obviously false and I think the prestige and optics of office spaces heavily play into the priorities of managers, especially as compared to people who do any other kind of work