A lot of comments are indicating you're alone on this, but I'm finding the contrary. Our team doubled in size in the last 6 months or so with an office mandate (to almost 20 now). With aggressive hiring goals, we discussed whether we might have to transition to a remote company to satisfy market expectations, but found that as long as we're completely transparent in the initial conversation, there are people who are all-in on RTO.
One of our recent senior hires specifically wanted an in-office role and a lot of our junior engineers are hungry to learn from the seniors.
What I suspect is there will be a divide in the coming years and as long as companies are open about who they are, people can make the choice of where they want to work.
This makes absolutely no sense to me and even as an American, often times reads like anti-China propaganda. If the algorithms are showing STEM content on the Chinese version of TikTok, it's likely the result of two reasons:
1. Chinese children prefer STEM content and the algorithm is providing that to them.
2. It's enforced by the Chinese government or someone who believes this kind of content will benefit the Chinese future.
In the case of #1, this is a cultural issue and we have no one to blame but ourselves.
In the case of #2, which I believe is what most folks who say this are suggesting, I can't imagine why children would then proceed to download the app, use it for hours a day, only to learn science and math. Sure, some may enjoy it (as some in the US would as well), but a vast majority of that market is going to reject this and delete it from their phone. In fact, we have this in the US -- we have educational TV shows, you can visit a library on your free time, etc, but kids don't do it-- because they're kids.
It seems to be strongly synergistic with a lot of their existing product offerings.
Getting the technology done even better means that Chromebooks and Androids (or even the browser) could be heavyweight gaming machines -- and thereby increasing those audiences.
As those audiences grow (and they're already big), having better hardware streamlined into Stadia means they immediately have insane distribution power. If you consider mobile gaming dominance in Asia, and the ability to release triple-A games immediately to a billion devices worldwide, that creates huge leverage over iOS.
Then as you said, GCP. I think someone with an idea and roadmap was there, but FAANG incentive programs don't reward people focused on the long game.