1. I have friends and don't need to source them from work
2. I focus at home much better when there aren't dozens of people around me all talking.
3. It's 2022 - thanks to inventions like computers, phones, Zoom, and Slack, it is possible to have discussions with people without being physically co-located.
4. Again, people are perfectly capable of having discussions without being physically co-located in the same space.
5. lol

Like you, the boomers who run my company keep waxing poetic about the benefits of in-office collaboration, but no one is actually able to give me a specific, concrete example on what I, as a software engineer, gain from working in the office that I can't replicate at home with some combination of Slack, Zoom, and VisualStudio live share.

A lot of people go on about the "social benefits", but I go to work to exchange my labor for capital so that I can live under the capitalist system - I don't go to work to socialize. I have friends that I choose to spend my time with, I don't source friends at work.
Not to mention that COVID, even mild COVID, literally shrinks peoples' brains and inflames cardiac tissue.

I'm pretty sure that upper management just hates their wives and families, so they use the office as an escape. And they know that the office would be empty if lower level employees were given a choice to not come in, so they use their power to mandate that everyone comes in and keeps them company.

And we're all risking literal brain damage so that these people don't get lonely.

There's this one woman in the billing dept who has this same set of phrases that she'll cycle through, like some video game NPC:

"Working hard, or hardly working?"

"Mondays, huh?"

"Looks like you got some good work done today!"