I read something the other day that mentioned an early Fauci quote about how the pandemic would be in recession when we had less than 1k a week dying, and the author of the article pointed out that we had never gotten close to that number. So yeah they just made a command decision to manufacture the end, probably because they couldn't stand the unintentional worker benefits that were a silver lining of the COVID pandemic (flexibility, some protections, some better pay in some cases) and because corporate landlords were screaming bloody murder. Can't let our big pocketed speculators down you know!

I work at a place that has a lot of staff, and the age demographics are skewed towards older--I know of at least two coworkers that I actually knew, as in had met and had conversations with, that died of COVID, so when they just arbitrarily announced RTO, I couldn't help but view it as a cold decision to "age out" some more staff in exchange for a return to managerial viability. Our productivity had been the same or better during the WFH years as well, so they didn't really have a good excuse beyond, hey this is what everybody has to do now, just be adults about it and accept your added long term health risks and be grateful.