To reply to myself: I guess I should say that what the Fed is doing is class warfare and a major unspoken reason for what they're doing is to remove bargaining power from the workers. They would be more concerned about pay and breaking the back of union organizing if they thought and talked about it more clearly. But they don't consciously talk about class warfare, they've got terms of art they use to talk about it like "2% inflation target" which is nice and ambiguous. However, "removing bargaining power from workers" is certainly a large enough bucket to stuff "remote work" into it as well.

So they certainly do want to remove bargaining power, and some managers will think it'll be effective at enforcing RTO, but it isn't clear to me that the crude mechanism they've got will actually result in that. All they can really do is run the economy into a wall. The exact way that it breaks will depend on the push/pull of desperate workers willing to take office jobs again vs. desperate CFOs wanting to get out of office leases and crashing commercial real estate. The real driving force is just reducing worker bargaining power around pay and benfits and organizing though. The effect on remote work vs. RTO will have to play out to see how it happens.

My own personal bet is that the cat is out of the bag when it comes to remote work, and that a recession will cause more companies to re-embrace full time remote work to cut costs to survive and flourish. And current RTO companies may start looking at their commercial office properties as massive boat anchors.