Your initial post was about there being choice. Now it appears that the upside of the office is the others being there.

I can understand that some people like the physical distinction between "work" and "home". My boss is like that, and he would actually go to the office during covid when no one else would be there. He lived alone in a comfortable apartment, so there wasn't even a question of loud kids / no space for a desk. It obviously never came up that we should also show up. He sometimes wants us to come in the office, all the at the same time, for some form of all-hands meetings, but he doesn't just drop them out of the blue: we plan these together, and they don't happen on a fixed, tight schedule.

The company has now moved to a "flex office" scheme. I was already not very happy having to go in, but you can imagine I now abhor it. Having to share desks with people who don't give a shit about office equipment, having to clean up the screens because they figure it's fine to stick their fingers on them and having to use shoddy peripherals... And it goes on and on, you've read it on every HN post on the subject.

Luckily for me, they don't really enforce this, and I can still spend most of my days WFH and still have a semi-dedicated desk.

But your post is the reason why many people are up in arms against this whole "the office is better". Apparently, it's only better if you force everybody back in. So it's not really about "choice", but about having one's preferences be the "right" ones.