A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete.

You're loving the RTO now, but then half a year later the management decides to fire dozens of people and replace them with this flashy new thing called AI, which gets the job done in 6 hours instead, even if buggy, and causing even more problems with unnoticed misinterpretations, but hey, 6 hours is so much less than 3 weeks, and we saved a lot of money!

And then the reduced staff will have to do even more work, get swamped, then gets replaced by AI (which still leads to inferior product), and by that point the management won't even consider RTO being the reason for all that inefficiency.

You could have done the job at home in 3-4 hours, but instead they shot themselves in the foot and still considered it a win.

Oh, and the office that they are renting and that is now half empty because of the reduced staff...? Suddenly it's not a problem like it was with remote working.