"Bad" company: Growing pushback from employees asking great questions… for example, why they should be required to sit on zoom at an office, conferencing with their remote colleagues

Why wouldn't this occur, in even greater magnitude, at a company with zero accountability regarding the whereabouts of the employees? Where an employee can wake up any morning and just decide not to come in? Where nobody can say with any certainty who will attend a meeting, or be in the building, or available to be on a call, at any time? Where nobody has any responsibility to ensure co-workers schedules line up, or that the person responsible for Task A completes it within a timeframe to allow the Task B person to meet his/her deadline?

You are conflating showing up at a physical office with being accountable and doing your work. True, my employer doesn’t care about my whereabouts, but they do care that I’m contributing, available to my colleagues, and adhering to reasonable schedules/deadlines. The reality is that for knowledge workers, none of this requires regular physical presence in an office with Zoom, Slack, and a calendar. This is a fact that’s been proven and accepted in my workplace for years now and there’s no reason to go back.