Totally agree! From a personal standpoint, if you work hybrid you don't have the flexibility to live where you want because you are tied to an office. This can be very challenging in households where multiple people have careers especially at the rate that layoffs/job changes happen now. Also what many people are running into is that if they work from home they need a home office, yet they can only afford a home office in places that are a far commute for the days they do go in...

From a company standpoint, it becomes tricky to always have people both in office and at home because then the office needs to set up for people to always join virtually and employees tend to wonder why they drove in just to sit on Zoom. Resources aren't being maximized for value at all and their labor pools are limited to their office location. Plus as you mentioned, it becomes difficult to keep up a culture of transparency and communication when there is a group of people having water cooler conversations that leave others out.

It seems odd to me that so many businesses are choosing this path forward when there are so many clear downsides. Even if they are stuck in leases those are sunk costs which is the first thing we were taught in introductory econ!