> I was on the phone, tethered to my desk, all-day every-day.

If by "on the phone" we mean "in a voice and/or video call", I was in a similar situation to the OP. I'm a programmer.

RTO made no sense for our very geographically distributed team, but the mandate came down anyway. Most of us were staring down the barrel of a multi-hour commute to hot-desk in a notably overcrowded office with underprovisioned Internet service to execute the task of being on the phone all day, every day with a very geographically diverse set of colleagues.

Such collaboration, such synergy, much wow.

Software engineer, who was often also filling the role of product owner and scrum master as well.