Your example forgets to acknowledge that while there may have been good reasons for people to not be allowed to work remotely, COVID is a very pressing reason to do allow it, and the benefit of allowing people to work remotely vs getting absolutely nothing done or getting fined by the government for forcing people to come in is extremely obvious. So much so that the cons of allowing this have to be put aside, or remediated differently (which in some cases can even require investment).

It's a risk assessment that suddenly tilted the other way.

I don't agree with "everybody should work from the office" sentiments, myself, but I have seen this happen very clearly in many organizations.