Granted, the pandemic was a huge forcing factor, but maybe all it did was compress what would have been the next several years of change into only about a year.

"Futurists" for years have been pushing the narrative that virtual presence will abate the need for actual physical presence, particularly when all that is accomplished by transporting people halfway around the world is that they can talk to each other. The earliest attempts to accomplish this by electronic means may have been awkward and even unreliable, but growth is almost always accompanied by growing pains. The state of the art has been constantly improving.

I believe it would be a Very Good Thing if Zoom meetings and the like obviated much of the business travel in the world, greatly reducing the amount of CO2 belched into the air by airliners (to say nothing of particulate pollution). Maybe someday the loss of life in airliner crashes will become a once-a-decade event because airliners just aren't that essential, and forgoing air travel will become easier and easier.