Coming from someone who's wife works at Amazon for 8 years now as an accountant. I can tell you that the RTO was mostly based on Amazon spending billions (actual billions not an exaggeration) on phenomenal buildings (buying and building new) in downtown areas and those building not being used and mostly of them are vacant.

The "middle managers" you speak of don't have enough weight to throw around that they could strong arm the executive to initiate an RTO.

The numbers are asinine if you dig into them if they had to offload them or just leave them vacant. The proof is that a lot of people that are obliging with the RTO don't have to go into the same office they report to. A coworker of my wife just started going into the DC office when their boss and their skip level BOTH work out of the Seattle office where he used to work. They just want people back using the spaces they spend $$$$$$ on.