Well, I got all this from your first answer, but you do again seem to avoid the point that it costs a lot of money to put people in an office, as well as strongly restricting the pool of workers.

Let's look at your first example of the junior programmer who was stuck for days and then got unstuck. Why exactly could that scenario not have happened working remotely?

The manager detects that the programmer is stuck, and helps them out. Why is the location important there? That exact same story could have happened locally or remotely.

If this worker had lost his job working from home, the issue would have been the manager's fault, simply not detecting they were stuck.

Why is it easier to detect if a programmer's stuck locally? Why is it easier to help them locally than remotely? These are the key questions you don't answer.

If these two alternatives were the same, there would be no argument, but they aren't. Having an office and people commuting to it is very expensive, for the company, for the worker, and for the environment.

Why can't management teach these skills and this mindset to workers, rather than spending some 15% of the workers' salaries simply to provide a desk for them?

And let me be blunt here - it's pretty clear that if programmers were left to their own resources, the majority would choose to keep the extra time they spend commuting, and have the extra money it costs to keep an office running spent on their salaries instead.

For this idea of having an office to work, management is going to have to force a lot of people who'd rather be at home to come to work, or they're going to have empty offices with just a few people in them, which is not much use to anyone.

This is why there are so many news stories (example) about "return to work mandates" which force people back into the office. If it were really the case that offices were so popular, why would these mandates be needed?