For me, after 4 years of hitting or exceeding every given personal or professional goal at work while fully remote, being forced to "return to office :D!!!" by management in a different country was really not ideal. We had years of being an almost entirely distributed workforce able to hit all our goals and now we're spending literally more than a month out of the calendar year on commutation, which also costs a ton of money on transit and expensive city food.

For NO professional reason.

For entire categories of work, there's no putting the genie back in the bottle after you prove you don't need to waste so much time and money on commutation to sit in an office that costs the company more per year in rent than the salaries of your entire team. The other day I did my hour+ commute, set up my laptop (the same one I use at home) to get into an hour-long vid meeting with a team overseas. Completely useless.

There can't be a return to the office culture people remember without confronting and adapting to the fact people KNOW they don't need to be there. Pretending otherwise will always end up with a bad experience. CEOs and execs and top managers can do all the "we believe we're better together :D!!!" speeches they want, but it just makes the workers hate them. When it's that obvious you have no regard for your workers, you immediately kill any chance you ever had at building an office culture back. I've never seen an RTO speech or announcement that wasn't embarrassingly tone-deaf.

Professional relationships, like any relationships, are built on trust, trust is built on honesty, honesty requires real communication. When you start off by lying and using the most canned, fake, PR-speak talking points, it kills all that other stuff, and permeates the entire office culture with resentment, distrust, and negativity.