You let "hold teams accountable" do a lot of lifting.

I think whats happening is that non-technical leaders can't assess why projects aren't being delivered. No engineer is going to say "sorry I wasn't really working that hard, thats why we missed". Instead there will be some rationale as to why the project couldn't ship on time - not enough resources, incomplete spec, tech debt, whatever. Non-technical leaders want to be able to remove one variable from the equation - the cause being the team didn't put in the effort. With return to office, they can see with their own eyes if people are putting in the "time".