Somebody has to teach the twenty-three-year-old
Remote work is comfortable for people who already have a network and a reputation. It is a closed door for the person who has neither.
Notice who makes the case for working from home. It is almost always somebody with fifteen years of contacts, a reputation that precedes them into a meeting and a manager who already knows what they are worth. For that person the office is pure overhead, and they are right.
Now take the twenty-three-year-old. No network, no track record, no idea which of their instincts are good. What they need is the thing that has never once been delivered on a scheduled call: the overheard argument, the correction that lasts four seconds, the senior person who turns their chair around because something in the room sounded wrong.
That is apprenticeship, and it is not a nostalgia. It is how a profession reproduces itself, and it is the first thing a fully distributed company quietly stops doing, because nobody's calendar has a slot marked "notice what the new person is getting wrong".
A firm is also entitled to decide how it works. Employment is an exchange, not a grant, and the terms are set at the front rather than renegotiated afterwards by whoever finds the commute inconvenient. Hiring on one basis and then declining the basis is not a principle.
The honest version of the mandate is narrow, and worth defending in that form: not five days because five is a number, but enough days that the people who have everything to learn are in a position to learn it from the people who already have.