There have been a number of conferences I've missed this year because they returned to in person. Sorry, I'm in it for a few talks, I'm not uprooting my week to fly to Portland and hunt for accommodations. A big slap in the face when they don't even offer recorded sessions online. Like, if the conference is about sharing knowledge with the world, don't you want to let the world access that knowledge?
Do you want them to put out free content that took a lot of money to co-ordinate and produce or do you want them to spend a lot of money setting up a paywall for access that very few people will buy?
All these conferences have corporate sponsors and paid-for sessions by their employees as sales and recruiting tools. The content should be freely accessible, your ticket buys you renting out the conference space and food.
I bet for most of these conferences, those costs are rounding errors in the grand scheme. When Microsoft has Microsoft build, the cost of the space and food is nothing compared to the return they are going to get from companies who turn around a pour money into azure because of what they demonstrated at the conference. Same with other companies.
The cases where this probably isn't true are going to be the conferences like Debconf or BSDConf. Mind you, these conferences have been hosting all their sessions on youtube for years.
