You can maybe make the argument that regional banks want people back in the office because they have self interest in commercial real estate as a whole but outside that the argument is brain dead stupid IMO.
To me, it is all so simple. Does the micro manager to a fault know they are a micro manager? Of course they do but they can't help it. It is strategic and a trade off. It is the same exact thought process but just applied at the company level.
The economy is a bogus argument because you can always blame the economy for not moving out.
If the economy is bad then you can't move out.
If the economy is good well then it is just about to get bad so you can't move out either.
There was never a time in the past that renting didn't eat up most of your money. I didn't know anyone who moved out when I moved out that wasn't also dead broke. This was in the mid 90s though and it was the most magical time to be on your own and young. I don't think I would bother moving out now though if I was young because why pay so much more money just to fuck off on your phone in your own apartment instead of your parent's basement?
The economics are pretty much the same. The culture though is night and day different.
Your point is actually understated with saying "within a company the size of Google".
Thinking about it, the same dynamics hold at even the smallest scale. If a company has two divisions of 25 employees in each division, over time they will start to feel like working at two different companies if you work in both divisions. Even the same department can feel like a different company after a management shakeup.
At some point in the past it strikes me people could have made the exact same argument about any higher level language beyond assembly.
The best answer is really if you ask chatGPT "how has the forging of steel progressed since it was invented?".
To me, you are basically worried for no reason about what happens when the apprentices no longer spends their time heating and hammering iron to remove impurities and increase carbon content. There is a trade off involved here. I am sure the apprentices of old understood at a base level what was really going on in the forge better than a modern apprentice but that hardly is an argument against progress.
To me, it is all so simple. Does the micro manager to a fault know they are a micro manager? Of course they do but they can't help it. It is strategic and a trade off. It is the same exact thought process but just applied at the company level.