I think there are legitimately people out there who can’t function without other people being in the same room as them - and if they happen to be in a position of authority where they can inflict that on other people it causes a lot of problems for everyone else.

I’m in a situation like that now where even though that person is six levels above me and will never know my name or speak with me directly, they are constantly trolling everyone to make sure people have cameras turned on, reminding everyone that remote work is a privilege (no it is keeping us alive, disease monkey), and they are plotting regional and global meetups for teams, or buying everyone VR headsets, etc.

But to what ends? Why would I want to get into a COVID tube and fly to Germany to eat a throw-away processed turkey sandwich and bag of chips with co-workers and then fly back in another COVID tube a day later? What would be accomplished by that? Considering the airfare and hotel costs those have to be the most expensive bag lunches ever made.

I understand your observation but I respectfully don't think the conclusion is the case - at a large company I have seen an internal report that shows a substantial issue with productivity that points directly to a lack of in-person interactions as the cause. The Amazon CEO not citing data in his decree does not mean there's no data, or that the data is poor, or that the decision is based on a gut feeling. Amazon is a self-declared data driven company with 1.5 million employees - they absolutely have run the numbers on as big of a decision as this and I would be surprised that a decision as high-stakes as this (both execs and WFHers would agree) would not have due-diligence data to back it up. It is just not shown. The CEO is exercising his authority instead. I think after 3 years of being unable to fix these issues, the decision is final and hence the reliance on authority as an argument instead of data. Giving people data to try to pick apart would just be an unproductive activity that would only serve to damage efforts - it's not meant to be a conversation.

This is normal. All these companies claim be data driven, but when it comes down to it all of these decisions are based on feels. This applies just as much to technical rules as it does business decisions from the CEO. For example, when I have gone through infosec reviews, and I asked the reviewer to justify some rule with data, they can't do it, because it's just some wacky scenario they dreamed up but have no clue how probable/improbable it actually is.

What should they base it on? Lines of code or jira tickets? Most of the metrics you can name are things we as devs have insisted for years are not adequate to measure dev productivity.