The cynic in me sees the cost savings. Suddenly you're at work 24/7; no office space or workplace overhead, no office perks or food.
It’s more about convenience than the cost.
The only way to place gyms, makerspaces, and all the other fancy amenities right next to everyone's house would be to have very dense "techie towns" where the population (would have to he at the very least hundreds, better thousands) are all roughly like-minded, and even then you'd have issues with access control and trust (which requires a lot less friction inside a company, where too-far-out-of-bounds behavior is kept in check by the implied collateral of your high-paying job).
Don't you think "access to high quality food anytime they want for their whole family" (ideally through appropriate pay) be a minimum bar before they consider themselves, or we consider them, even close to "blessed"?
The primary motivator isn't to save a few bucks.
But also, it's going to save them a lot of cash. Those amenities are incredibly expensive. So much so that the IRS has probed around as to whether they're properly taxed at a compensation level commensurate with their value.
I recall 20 years ago a large UK company wanted to offer free tea and coffee as a perk.
And avoid also to avoid every group having its own coffee/tea club - which lead to messy looking offices and also incidents when some ones decides to take Wally" to task for not contributing.
Basically HMRC said oh that's nice here's the tax bill so that was the end of that.
Ironically it bit the HMRC in the ass as the CFO used the ability to distribute profit based tax free shares as a big F&% you.
0700-1600 only for me (almost four years 100% WFH).
I am an employee, and I am not at work 24/7.
That's being said, I don't work for Google, but the guarantee that I'd be able to move some place cheaper for a year would make these expenses easier to swallow.
But if these things last longtime or become permanent, I think people will start reconsider where they live. For instance, we could need an extra room for a proper office.
There are major cons to WFH - less collaboration, impact on productivity. I don't think Google cares enough about the 'cost savings' aspect of it, if it has any impact on productivity.