This times 10,000.

A friend worked for a company in Vancouver that rented a building big enough for the 30 person team to work. Before covid they went almost entirely remote, and all 30 people are flown to Vancouver ~8-10 times a year, put up in fancy hotels to do a 4 or 5 day course in the hotel function room.

It's cheaper for the company to pay for all of that than to rent the office space permanently.

And now the employee has to pay out of pocket for that ~100sqft or so of the home that has become an office: the heating or air conditioning of that space, the implicit cost in rent when the employee seeks a bigger place to rent, etc.

Yeah, but the comfort for the employee will go up because they get to define their own space and not have to share it. If they want blinding lights and warm: you got it. If they want darkness and cold: you got it.

Companies should probably kick in a small office stipend, but the cost / sq foot of suburb vs cost / sq foot downtown is usually pretty huge.

True. I pay even more, as I rent a small office within walking distance of my house since the pandemic started, to have a quiet separate space for working.

But, I can't complain. While I don't like to pay for it, objectively the cost of the office isn't more than the cost of fuel for the commute and all those expensive lunches at the office.

And my commute is now a couple minutes on bicycle and I can be home any moment, run local errands during the day (impossible when I was an hour away), I no longer need to drive anywhere, etc. Life is better.

Those savings could be wiped out from a security breach by a remote worker. Compliance will be much harder with remote work, and I don't think that's priced in yet since the trend is so recent.

yes but they only make those savings if they can ditch the buildings completely, which most can't.