That case could still be appealed and overruled. And then it could go to the Supreme Court, which would likely take years to resolve. Better to be safe than sorry, rather than hope that the case will stand.
It also doesn't fix the problem where a number of contractors sue you even if they might be wrong. It could very easily be a class action lawsuit like the one that cost Microsoft a lot of money. They could use those rules as a start and then throw a few other things together such that Google thinks it might have a problem in court and wants to settle rather than risk getting sued by every single contractor.
I can guarantee you this made more people adverse to the cause than for it. They did everything wrong, and many of the people who might have had a chance at trying to change things are out of Google and will not be able to do anything.
It's also likely that people who saw this might now not want to be involved at all for fear of losing their job.
This action likely did nothing but make it less likely that anything will change, and been the absolute worst way to attempt to persuade people.
But that assumes that Google would settle. Without that happening, you are looking at years before getting a result, thousands of dollars of attorney fees and a high likelihood that if they lost they would appeal.
This might be more of an emotional lawsuit than a logical one.
I see this all of the time, but without any evidence. Even your edit says they get a "butts in seat" tax break. But how much is that? I can very easily see the savings of remote employees being way higher than this tax break. You might need to spend a bit more on IT and maybe on equipment. Then again you save on cleaning (not needed as often), garbage, electricity and anything else related to maintenance. Maybe it's slightly more expensive, or slightly less expensive. I've never seen anyone break the numbers down before making this claim. It feels like an appeal to emotion, those bad companies only care about money. Even if that's true, this argument doesn't prove it's true in this case.
And this all assumes long term leases or you own the building. It's possible to pay to get out of leases some time, and you can sell the building if you think it's going to cost millions to keep owning it.
Also, we are seeing lots of smaller businesses also requiring people to come back to the office. If they are getting some huge tax break for a 100 person company, how much is that? I'm happy if I'm wrong, and this is some huge tax break that saves companies millions of dollars, but I think it's fair to ask for evidence that this really saves the money people claim it saves.
I think there are other dumb reasons people are being called back, it just doesn't feel like this is one of the reasons.
While most of this comment is true, there are lots of youtubers that can make it full-time without getting millions of subscribers. The key is that you can't rely on adsense, you need to get as many different ways of getting income as possible (patreon, sponsors, merch, etc).
From my observation, it seems an active base of around 200,000 subscribers seems to be where you can do it full-time. I've even seen people with about 100,000 subscribers go full-time.
The trick is that you can't just be making videos, you have to take on a lot of the business parts too. If you just want to make videos and nothing else, then you would probably need hundreds of thousands of views per video to make a living.
It also doesn't fix the problem where a number of contractors sue you even if they might be wrong. It could very easily be a class action lawsuit like the one that cost Microsoft a lot of money. They could use those rules as a start and then throw a few other things together such that Google thinks it might have a problem in court and wants to settle rather than risk getting sued by every single contractor.