This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago.
> why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously.
> why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.