I think you're significantly underestimating the value of many other aspects:
- Things that happen outside of meetings, which are what the remote-video rule is for, not everything categorically. e.g. debugging together when in, white-boarding, the quick desk visit, etc. As I said, teams can (and do) coordinate to come in on the same day
- Socially, the return being happier workers, better teamwork to fall back on when you're remote, etc.
- The people who do not have a good home office setup for many various reasons that affect both young and old.
There are countless benefits, there's no magical "this is the reason to be in the office" that you can reduce to. The "video conferencing by default" rule is the tradeoff for not disadvantaging people who want to retain their less frequent office time schedule of the pandemic.
- Things that happen outside of meetings, which are what the remote-video rule is for, not everything categorically. e.g. debugging together when in, white-boarding, the quick desk visit, etc. As I said, teams can (and do) coordinate to come in on the same day
- Socially, the return being happier workers, better teamwork to fall back on when you're remote, etc.
- The people who do not have a good home office setup for many various reasons that affect both young and old.
There are countless benefits, there's no magical "this is the reason to be in the office" that you can reduce to. The "video conferencing by default" rule is the tradeoff for not disadvantaging people who want to retain their less frequent office time schedule of the pandemic.