Comment by treis
Because it's really hard for a company to do both. Even if it's a remote first and the office is just a place to do zoom calls. Human nature will divide it into two camps with social bonds being stronger within the remote/on office groups than across.
Speaking as someone who would have to be dragged back to an office, it's obvious that the in office group would win out. Bonds are weaker in the remote group and your type A ladder climbers will be overrepresented in the in office group.
So hybrid office is probably going to lead to all in office. Especially in these difficult economic times as workforces stagnate or shrink in these companies.
Teams that are relatively co-located geographically can coordinate to come into a location regularly on the same days. That really didn't happen where I worked and, as far as I know, the company continues to shed real estate. I'm not sure the execs especially liked the shift but, starting from the base of a fairly remote-friendly company, COVID just largely shredded whatever in-office culture there was for better or worse.
So, yeah, I think there was some pre-COVID middle ground but you probably have a fairly large percent of people mostly coming into an office and a fairly small percent doing so--which of course tends to reinforce both behaviors. (And it grew a lot in a distributed manner as well which probably made getting everyone together physically all the time less relevant.)