Wouldn't be surprised if this is just to weed out employees so they don't need to do layoffs. Forcing return to office keeps employees that are "loyal" to the company while potentially trimming down total headcount.
They'll have a ton of workers who are hundreds to thousands of miles away, housed elsewhere, with kids in school, who will have to quit rather than somehow go to that office, so yeah.
I've been saying this since the tech industry has been pushing RTO, I used to work in a large company that hopped on the layoff wave and they were pushing HARRRRDD for RTO. I quit before the bloodbath and found a more fun job :)