Existing companies will probably continue to operate just fine, but the next wave of game changing companies will be small and in person.
The next wave of game changing companies will be the ones to hire the best people. I find it very unlikely that being 100% in person will be a competitive advantage versus companies that can simply hire the best and ask them to work in the way they consider the most productive.
How do we know that saying in-person innovation isn't a post hoc justification? You can't mandate innovation, you can't order innovation, innovation only comes from individuals; I doubt they would have been less innovative if they worked in person or remotely, and we'll unlikely ever know since we can't run a perfect experiment to verify this.
The next wave of game changing companies will be solely due to individuals being at the right place at the right time, whether that's remotely or in person I doubt that one aspect would be critical.
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, etc may have offices, but half of them are in other countries around the world. Teams are constantly having remote meetings to meet up with their counterparts on the other side of the world. That's not in-person work. That's remote work in an office.
If you have to meet virtually with people in other offices, and do sync-ups with them, and use out of band tools to collaborate, are you really in-person? Why am I doing 9pm meetings when my job is in-office? What kind of in-person collaboration are you doing when you're not meeting in-person?
Obviously there is a spectrum, but having worked at multiple FAANG companies, teams are generally collocated and a majority of your interactions are within your team. And of course these companies are only able to have many offices because they experienced a large amount of success when there was only one office.
Otherwise, commuting and interruptions isn't conducive to focus and getting shit done. Fuck, my monitors at home are bigger than anything in any office and I have my keyboard tray, so why on Earth would I want to go into an office with a shittier setup? Also, most offices took away their snacks in the trendy spirit of being cheap and enshitifying their culture.
I am right with conspiracy nut job. If we cooperate in person, you would be exposed to my rants and other quirks. With remote there is no such issue. We can cooperate just fine.
I think some people just hate remote, because they do not have their own social circle. They also have no working habits to be productive with async communication. They expect prepackaged deal of friendship, mentorship and support.