The traditional rules of good code are heuristics that are practical for human developers. A different set of heuristics will emerge for agentic development.
Sometimes the world changes such that two parts of a process that used to be tied together are unraveled into separate practices. Technology always plays a part in this, but AI is driving this process in many fields now in a way that is outside the bounds of what we were prepared for mentally.
Usually this happens slowly enough over time that we can adapt to it sociologically or generationally such that we don't see or feel the pain so distinctly. There likely were people that were upset when commodity paints were introduced because, for them, part of painting was creating your own palate of paints. Of course, you can still do that even today, but it is no longer necessarily tied to the process of painting.
This is happening in areas that we didn't anticipate it happening and happening to a bunch of them at the same time. Ignoring point-in-time AI model quality meaning that a given output is 50, 80, 95, or 99, 100, of 120% as good as a human, we have the ability to use AI now to achieve outcomes in many fields that required some sort of craftsmanship to achieve prior.
People who enjoy the craftsmanship are understandably shaken up because their craftsmanship has been drastically devalued. Some people simply want to achieve the outcome and were previously frustrated by being gatekept by not having the skill or experience that craftsmanship demanded and they are now thrilled to be able to do something they couldn't before. Both of these are understandable experiences and exist/live together without contradiction.
Great, then you don't have to work remote. Your preferences are orthogonal to the freedom other people have or don't have to make the choices that are appropriate for them.
Microsoft compensates less than other top tech companies and remote work aligns with their lifestyle-first approach to compensation. Being on the early end of RTO would have worked against the perception that Microsoft is "the tech company with good work life balance," but now that most other companies have done it first they can get away with it as just them following the industry trend.