PIPs? RTO? You work for amazon, right?

If you want to work remotely and your director wants people back in the office then they’d probably want to get rid of you rather than having a remote worker other people could point to and say “but he works remotely, why can’t I?”. If that’s the case then your manager could have put you on a PIP so you’d come under unregretted attrition rather than regretted attrition.

Managers can get judged on how many of their reports leave the company/team and if the company wants them to stay or not. If the manager can get rid of someone on a PIP then that looks good for the manager. Maybe this is what’s happened to you in this case.