Do you have any sense of how many people who are forced to head to an office each day would rather not? Probably not. I know I don't. But that's because the majority controls how these people work.
Working remotely doesn't mean you're a hermit. If you are, your organization has a communication problem. I work remote and am able to get social interaction instantly with anyone in the organization.
Yes, I'd call it much closer to monk-like existence.
It still isn't what the vast majority of humanity is going to prefer.
The proof is that if there was some sort of massive preference for working from home, we should be seeing it now. The tech is here. The Internet is here. The computing power is here. All the preconditions would seem to be here. If what is missing isn't that humans don't generally prefer to be physically together in a group structure, what exactly is it? If the revolution is so inevitable, what's stopping it?
If the answer is "Well we need more VR that makes it feel like they are there", that's a goal post move. May be true, but still a goal post move. If the answer is "because $MANAGEMENT", what's going to change about that in the future, and why aren't the managers also eager to work from home if it's so inevitable? If the answer is "Well Americans (who are uniquely terrible in all the world) have this irrational desire to spend time in their car in gridlock because they love it so much" then I guess that's more inevitable than the move to telecommuting then, huh? I haven't got an alternate explanation for why this isn't already happening that makes any sense, other than, we are not generally psychologically suited to work that way.
While I WFH quite a bit, I have to disagree with this statement. For a lot of interaction modes, being remote still lacks a lot of the bandwidth (for lack of a better term) than in person. If you're working out a problem/presentation/etc. with a group, it's still hard to beat a conference room with a whiteboard.
Things are better than they used to be. Something like Google Docs can certainly help. But working with a group F2F, serendipitous encounters, informal interactions, etc. can be hard to replicate. And, again, I say this as someone who works remotely much of the time and doesn't go out of my way to commute, even though it's not a bad commute.
Maybe we'll have to wait until mind-integration VR becomes a thing.