There is this misconception today that you can argue everything, including the laws of nature.
For "For software engineers, open-plan offices lead to greater productivity than individual offices" we don't need arguments but experiments and science.
Once you have the experiments and science, you still need to conclude for yourself. Empirical science does not give you perfectly proven insights. Especially, if the question is hard to define, costly to evaluate, and underfunded.
If you had 5 studies regarding open-plan offices, you still need to check which ones are the most trustworthy, find out if and why they disagree, decide which outliers you ignore, etc.
> There is this misconception today that you can argue everything, including the laws of nature.
I just wrote a comment about this, responding to global warming debate. Perhaps what this platform needs to address that is an ability to separate facts (that is, sources) and opinions (that is, synthesis or analysis of the sources).
For "For software engineers, open-plan offices lead to greater productivity than individual offices" we don't need arguments but experiments and science.