Is "implicitly unambiguous" anything but an oxymoron? Do you think all humans have access to your mental model of the world?

I don't think that was obvious. There were lots of executives praising lots of teams for keeping things running perfectly fine while remote. There is no obvious reason to RTO when everything was working fine with remote workers.

In my mind, it was to be temporary until the risk of infection at the office was back to pre-pandemic levels. I understand that at this point it's more likely that we'll define the problem away and normalize shifting that much more of a health risk onto employees, but going by the original "implicit" agreement we're still in that temporary period. Of course it's not serious to threat it as temporary because companies and people have made permanent adjustments that won't be rolled back.

My (Amazon subsidiary!) employer at no point made anyone(†) go back to the office. I happily returned when vaccines were widely rolled out, but quickly realized people were still getting infected left and right and decided to minimize office visists while strictly masking. A good half of the team moved out of state and never came back, future hires were fully remote as often as not. I got hit by layoffs eventually but as far as I have heard the remaining team has not gotten any less distributed.

I don't think it's reasonable to describe a forced move to full office attendance as an inevitable "return to normal", even if we back in March 2020 would have expected it to have happened by now. But now in 2024, the world has changed and it's an explicit employment policy decision that as a purpose-of-a-system-is-what-it-does thing aims to continue layoffs while paying less severance etc.

(† naturally from atop my ivory throne of tech-wrought hubris, I am discounting actual office staff like facilities and security as well as some portion of IT etc)