In my opinion, the era of remote work is sadly over. It's been so short, just a few years, and more companies are already returning to the normal on-site, or at most hybrid way of working.
Only companies in which you are "hooked" on a program anyway and you cannot stop working because the process is constantly monitored, may still leave similar positions, such as customer support for example.
There are also some fairly low paying positions that are still offered as remote work, and the pay is so low precisely because the work is offered "from the comfort of your own home", lol. It's the exact opposite of the logic you mention yourself that when employers hire people who work for them from home, those employers' costs are reduced.
Of course, I am talking about the situation in my country, where everything is extremely distorted, including the labor market. Personally, for many months I have not been able to find a remote position where the cons are less than the pros or at least equal.
Sadly the demands for remote work is less now to some extent.
However, the likes of content creators, local translators, web/software developers, content writers, graphic designers, mobile developers, research engineers, data scientists and project manager...etc are still on high demands.
I fully understand this. And really understand when you said the "era has ended". Nigeria is also facing this too unfortunately. But amidst this, the few people I listed above are still on high demands.., there are even competition when it comes to the pay.
Yes, as for me, the future is just for fully remote work, we have almost four years as the whole team has already moved to such work, the only thing is that at first it was difficult to organize a quality workflow, but in this regard it is good that there are so many programs that help to track the work of all employees, I can not help but highlight Kickidler https://www.kickidler.com/ as the real most convenient option for this, just try it, I assure you, you will like it and will help to increase the productivity of the team in several times