They lose money if they do it.

Do what?

Executives are interested in preserving their buddies and their investments in large corporate rental space.

How does forcing their own workers back into their office raise or lower the value of their own real estate? If they use it, they won't sell it, value is irrelevant then.

But lots of companies that are nothing to do with hedge fund management or also pushing people do return to the office.

In those cases it's justifiable to have to work in-person. I don't think we'd want closed networks (presumably for stuff like nuclear power) exposed to the open internet.

Those networks are also not accessible from home networks, then. That is to say it's a valid point regarding each industry and company having different constraints, but it's not a concern over the security of home networks. If home/remote network security is ever the limiting concern, that can be mitigated by VPN.

That's also why you encrypt your drives. The average enterprise figured out how to let somebody work from an airport long ago. It's really not a huge deal.

They could be working from home and a neighbor peek through the window and see what you’re working on.

This is a joke, right? RTO won’t stop this “attack” either. Since we are looking at extreme situations, what’s to stop an attacker from using a high powered scope and peek at an executives computer? In an office environment you have plenty of targets to choose from and exfiltrate information.

Also, this is easily defeated by privacy screens. So this is a non-issue.

Also that VPN isn’t worth a damn if someone can get into your home and gain physical access to your device

You are right. Which is why multiple layers of defense is needed. VPN is just one layer, albeit a very poor “security by obscuration”

Ways to combat this is have data encrypted at rest, and in transit. Modern computers/OS have the ability to encrypt all data at rest. If computer is stolen, attacker can’t do much without the decryption keys. Also, thin clients (VDIs) can be used to further reduce chance of compromise of physical device. Data does not leave the secure data center of the firm.

Also, having applications / endpoints secured by MFA will help in reducing possible infiltration.

The only attack vector I can think of that will defeat these measures is a person held with a gun pointed to their head but this is why having multiple persons to confirm an action will help reduce the impact of one person.

but offices usually have a security system with alarms, cameras, and sensors

All easily defeated and poor security measures with the right motivation.

usually have stronger doors and locks

This is poor security as well. Perhaps even security theater. Unless the doors are bank vault level lol

None of the points you have given are valid in this digital age. A forced RTO is pointless.

Right... that's why you would use a VDI. There's nothing local except a thin client that runs your citrix/vmware/whatever client. There's a reason that VDI is generally used for PCI-compliant business cases but VPN is not.