I think both problems are real, and your last paragraph really gets at why. People and jobs vary widely, and so does the quality of management. If you have a strong business and reasonably mature teams, you might not even realize problems with your management culture and practice are until something big changes; conversely, if you have strong managers you might have been able to soak up a lot of personnel and job issues before they got attention because some unappreciated middle managers put a lid on potential problems first.

In all cases, you really someone with time to look at the business as a whole to evaluate these things. For example, one of the things which has made RTO unproductive for many workers are open plan offices, which is a really easy problem to see and fix if workplace productivity is someone’s job but not if the RTO push is being driven by politics or the need to justify leases.

Agreed, but falling commercial real estate prices will allow some forward thinking companies to go back to private offices for developers, which arguably is the best solution (apart from commute/flexibility) for most, productivity wise.