For most of the ones I mentioned you have to get high level approval these days. There are some positions and departments that are exempt. But it doesn’t seem the case for software engineers at those companies.

I work at AWS. But my position “cloud consulting” was always designed to be fully remote even pre-Covid. I was assigned to a “virtual office” when I was hired.

If they had changed that, there would have had to have been a long conversation about compensation increase. I agreed to my compensation explicitly because it was fully remote in a lower cost of living area.

I still honestly would have only stuck it out until the job market improved.