Comment by ghaff
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.)
Think this is like a lot of things that work in theory but don't work in practice. You think you'll get the best of both worlds but really you get the worst of both.